


You and I are Disappearing {SEMI-HIATUS}

by joojoobe



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst, Bartender AU, Homelessness, JaeYong - Freeform, Jaehyun is an alcoholic, M/M, Paranormal, Reapers, Soulmateau, characterdeath, redthreadoffate, taeyong is magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-19 02:06:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 50,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9413012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joojoobe/pseuds/joojoobe
Summary: Young bartender Lee Taeyong is marked by the devil's thumbprint. He has always been able to see how others will die. Just when he thought he'd come to terms with his curse, a stranger walks into the bar, introduces himself as Jaehyun, and orders a single malt whiskey. Taeyong sees it, though he doesn't want to believe it: This boy will die, because he will murder him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Barely a week after finishing my last story 'All the Trees in the Field Shall Clap their Hands', I'm back with yet another paranormal story. This one will be more lighthearted (maybe?) than my other stories, but there will be eventual trigger warning that I may add as we go on (for now, alcohol, drug abuse and some violence are the ones I forsee). The main characters will be Taeyong and Jaehyun, but the other NCT boys will be present as well. As usual, I plan out my stories very little and am writing off the cuff, but I do hope you'll join me for another adventure.

 

~

Chapter 1

~

 

          Taeyong woke, as always, well into the afternoon. The aching joints of his body rebuking him, he rolled onto his stomach, the angry red glow of the beside clock screamed 3pm at him. He groaned at his sunlight drenched room, cursing his own lack of foresight the night before. Why did he always forget to close the goddamned curtains before passing out despite knowing that sunrise was never far?

          Unsteadily, he sat up, pressing the heel of his palm against his throbbing temple. He’d had one too many shots while working the graveyard shift the night before. The reel of his memory ended with breaking a martini glass in the sink. He wasn’t sure if he’d finished cleaning the bar mats, or if he’d drained the detergent water in the sink. He barely even remembered the walk home, except for the vague memory of it being 6am by the time he was struggling to get his key into the lock, and that the 9-5 working crowd were already heading towards the subways in their suits and ties.

          “Hyung.” Came a small voice from beyond his door. “I’m coming in.”

          Without waiting for a response, his younger brother Mark was pushing his way in, balancing a tray of rice and soup in his arms. Clumsily splashing a quarter of the soup onto the tray, Mark made his way towards Taeyong’s bed, pushing the food onto his lap.

          “I made breakfast.” Mark said, a little too proudly. He was a terrible cook. Always had been. But god bless him anyways for trying.

          “Aspirin.” Taeyong mumbled, staring blearily into the suspiciously grey porridge on his lap.

           Like clockwork, Mark bent towards the bedside drawer, unearthing the small pill jar amongst the piles and piles of receipts, bottlecaps and knickknacks. Taeyong felt a brief twinge of something like guilt in his chest as Mark shook two blue tablets onto his palm. Most seventeen year old kids still spent their days being pampered by their parents, woke to homemade breakfasts of soup and grilled fish, had a figure to take care of and lead them. Mark had none of that. Instead, he spent his days caring after a hot mess of an older brother who came home drunk most days from work in the wee hours or the morning, and slept away the day until late afternoon. Rinse and repeat. Sure, Taeyong brought home money, but all the household responsibilities, every tedious chore fell upon Mark’s shoulders. And never a complaint out of him. Mark faced each day with the even disposition of a water-worn stone. It came to the point where Taeyong was not sure who was the guardian and who was the ward.

          “Thanks.” Taeyong murmured, digging in joylessly into his soup. He had to open the bar again at 6pm, and it was already inching towards 4:30. He would barely have time to eat and wash up before heading out. “Did you eat?”

           “Yeah. A few hours ago.” Mark answered. “I hope you weren’t planning on wearing the same outfit today as you were yesterday. There was a beer stain on the back so I threw it all in the wash. It’s probably not dry yet.”

          Taeyong shook his head. To hell with dressing nice. Today was a wife-beater and weathered jeans sort of day. He glanced up at his younger brother’s face, and immediately felt his heart drop, as it usually did. Mark really did resemble him very little, afterall, they did have different mothers. Where Taeyong’s face was a study of angles, all sharp edges and distant, uncanny beauty; Mark was soft lines and welcoming smiles. The only feature they shared between them that suggested any shared blood were their similarly coal black features, hair so onyx it was almost blue in the light, and eyes with the same perpetually blown wide pupils. Half-brother be damned, Mark was his only family. His timid little kid that he’d practically raised on his own. Which was why Taeyong practically wanted to blind himself when he could not look at him without seeing the spidery red lettering hovering over his head like a hellish nimbus: **Car Accident.**

          For almost as long as he could remember, Taeyong had been different from others. He could not look upon someone’s face without also seeing the red lettering haloed over their heads that detailed how they would die. His first memory of this was in elementary school. His second grade teacher with the word **Suicide** hovering over her like a miasmic cloud. Suicide? It was a word Taeyong did not recognize at that age. He’d raised his hand, asked its meaning. He remembered how his teacher had balked and stuttered, her face bleaching as she looked at the sea of children staring up at her expectantly. Then all at once, her face evened and she answered vaguely and with confidence: _It’s a bad thing. Something only a coward would do._

          “You’re zoning out again. Do you want me to call in that you’re sick?” Mark’s soft voice cut through Taeyong reverie, and he looked up. Mark’s dark eyes. The blue-black crown of his hair. The red lettering: **Car Accident.** _Car Accident._ Taeyong wasn’t sure when, but his baby brother would die in a car accident.

           “No.” Taeyong shook his head furiously, more at his own eyes than Mark’s benign question. He pushed the half eaten food aside and got up. “Rent is due soon, I can’t afford to miss a day.”

          “Okay..” Mark answered, watching his brother get up and bustle around like a wildfire. Taeyong rushed to the bathroom, splashing his face with cold water and brushing his teeth.

          “Are you leaving the house today?” Taeyong called from the bathroom between gargles.

          “Yeah, I’m going to a study group with Jaemin or Jeno today.”

          Taeyong came back into the room, pulling off his raggedy sleeping shirt (which he had no recollection of changing into), and pulling on a loose black wife-beater and distressed dark jeans. His hair was unwashed, but he mitigated that with a beanie. He glanced in the mirror. He looked a little too hipster for his taste, but it would have to do. He was already running late.

           “Good. Have them come here.” Taeyong said.

           “But we already agreed on Hongdae.” Mark began before Taeyong cut him off.

           “Have them come here. It’s going to rain a lot today so the roads will be dangerous. I don’t want you in a cab or a bus tonight. They can sleep over after.” Taeyong said firmly. He knew that to Mark, he must sound crazy. Like an overbearing parent. But he couldn’t censor himself.

          After a momentary, exasperated pause, Mark nodded. “Yeah, yeah hyung. Fine.”

          Taeyong smiled, ruffling his younger brother’s hair before heading out of the room. Mark padded softly like a puppy after him, holding open door. Outside, the pavement was slicked with rain, already, the sky beginning to darken with evening.

            “Be good.” Taeyong said opening up an umbrella.

          As he walked away, he heard Mark’s small voice saying “You worry too much,” right before the door clicked shut behind him.

 _I worry too much._ Taeyong repeated in his head and he walked slowly towards the bar. He looked at his watch. 5:30pm. He would make it in time. Despite the rain, the weather was disgustingly muggy, enough so that he felt warm despite his sleeveless shirt. All around, people darted under eaves to get out of the sudden downpour, and Taeyong tried and failed not to glimpse their futures. **Old age. Old age. Murder. Stroke.** That man, smoking under the food cart tent. **Cancer.** _I worry too much. Yes._

           Taeyong did worry a lot. He was anxious constantly, and how could he not be when he was confronted with death every passing moment of his life? He spent his waking moments voyeuristically observing the details of everyone’s eventual ends, and even his dreams were saturated with ominous red lettering that practically pulsed: **You and all that you love will be mine eventually.** It sometimes got to the point where he would rip up the skin of his nailbeds from nervous biting, the he would claw at the delicate flesh of his wrists until he drew blood. In fact, his hands and arms were covered in thick scar tissue from his nervous ticks. Taeyong had spent much of his early childhood in clinics and wards as his parents tried to find out what was wrong with him. He’d been diagnosed with everything from schizophrenia to manic-depressive disorder, put on all sorts of medication that plunged him into deep lethargy or bouts of hyperactivity. And in the end, there were no answers. The panic, the nervous ticks, the anxiety never completely went away. And eventually, they gave up trying to help him all at once and left him alone to flounder.

          Taeyong looked down at his feet as he walked, mindless of puddles, not really caring that his socks were getting soaked through. The anxiety may have been more manageable back then if he’d just had someone he could speak to honestly about his power, his death sight that he could neither ignore nor turn off. But he’d never been able to vocalize it. Whenever he tried, he was overtaken with wild sickness, first an unimaginable pounding in his head that sometimes culminated in nosebleeds, bloody coughing fits, nausea, fatigue. Even now, when Taeyong even considered trying to warn Mark of his fate, his entire body failed him, hinged his jaw shut. It was as if the devil himself had placed his thumb on both of Taeyong’s eyes, then stitched his mouth shut. It was their secret.

          It was their secret forever.

          As Taeyong finally reached the bar entrance and folded his umbrella, his mind inexplicably wandered towards that day so many years ago when the power was still new and he was only a child. He looked up towards the finally relenting clouds, the way they scattered like smoke against the ink of the night. _Teacher what is a suicide?_ The scarlet lettering curling like slow lighting over her head. Her surprised, almost frightened face. Her bark brown hair tied up in a top-knot. She’d been young, though Taeyong didn’t realize that back then. And then her firm voice: _It is a bad thing. Something only a coward would do._ A week later, authorities would dredge her body out from the bottom of a lake, her once pretty face blue and unrecognizable.


	2. The Undetermined

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. As always, feedback and thoughts are appreciated <3

~

Chapter 2

~

          “Well someone is disheveled.” Yuta, the bar-back called out as Taeyong stumbled into the bar. Taeyong caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and realized immediately just how worse for wear he looked. Uncharacteristically casual clothes aside, his face was gaunter than usual, hollowed out like a lightning-struck tree. And his normally bright eyes were marred with dark shadows.

          Yuta was working steadily to set up the bar, filling the tap trays with ice, slicing wedges of lemon and lime for garnishing, washing the sprigs of mint and rosemary they would use throughout the night in cocktails. Taeyong just smiled at him apologetically. Taeyong came to work exhausted on most days, so Yuta generally came early to set everything up for him. He didn’t have to. Yuta was just a good sport like that.

         “If you don’t take better care of yourself, your face won’t draw flocks of swooning girls anymore. And then how would we make money?” Yuta joked, though it was partial truth. Their bar was notorious in the neighborhood for only employing good-looking workers. Taeyong was sure their boss took appearance into consideration during the hiring process. And Taeyong was not one for false modesty. He knew that he and his coworkers were aesthetically pleasing, and that was partially why they made so much in tips. Taeyong didn’t feel any particular pride about this fact. His beauty was just a resource. Not an accomplishment.

          “Didn’t sleep so well. I barely even remember getting home.” Taeyong said, stepping behind the bar to wipe the streaks of dried water off the rock glasses. “But I woke up with this souvenir from yesterday.”

          He held up his right hand, showing him the gauze wrapped tightly around his palm.

          “A deep ass cut. I broke a glass in the sink yesterday, and my drunk self decided it was a good idea to clean it up with my bare hands. Hurts like a bitch. My brother patched it up for me while I was sleeping.”

          Yuta chuckled, bending to make sure all of the beer kegs were full. OB. Kloud. Sam Adams. Guinness. Left Hand Milk Stout. Sapporo. All full. They were good to go. He wiped each nozzle with a damp handkerchief before moving on to check which well liquors needed to be restocked.

          “What did you do in your past life to deserve a kid brother like Mark, huh TY? My sister wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire.” Yuta said, his words thorny as usual, but his tone of voice gave away nothing but aching fondness. Taeyong knew he missed his family in Japan dearly, though he liked to pretend like he didn’t.

           “More like what terrible sins did Mark commit in his past life to deserve me?” Taeyong replied, worrying briefly if Mark had listened to him and called Jeno and Jaemin over to their house for the study group rather than going out in the rain to meet them. Mark hardly ever lied, but Taeyong would call the house phone later to make sure.

           Taeyong hated how overbearing he was with Mark, but he just couldn’t help it. He wasn’t sure if there was anything at all he could do to change the fates of those around him, but trying was better than being idle. He knew all too well the sharp knife of being given up on. And he refused to be weak.

          The door’s heavy hinges squeaked as the two servers came in, already dressed in their matching white v-necks for work.

          “Hi you two. You’re late.” Taeyong called out to Johnny and Doyoung who muttered out hurried apologies. The two of them were as different in countenance as night and day. Johnny was an expat from Chicago who was as loud and bawdy as a sailor. His booming laughter and jokes would often ring out throughout the bar as if he were on loudspeaker. Yuta liked to complain about it, but everyone knew Johnny was the mood-maker of the staff. The one that diffused all of the tense, stress triggered moments that inevitably arose in every service job. The one that made customers laugh with his shameless, over-the-top flirting that was not restricted to any gender or particular age group. Doyoung was more delicate, so motherly that at times he seemed almost out of place working at a bar. He tended to be shy and react bashfully to teasing, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t able to occasionally dish it out. It was his generally gentle countenance that made his rare moments of sassiness all the more delicious.

          “I’m opening doors in twenty. Finish setting up quickly, yeah?” Taeyong called, and he heard Johnny cursing loudly in response. And then the tell-tale sound of the chair being brought down from the table with a metallic clang.

         They opened their doors at seven, and the customers began trickling in. Because of the heavy rain, it was not busy, just a few tables at a time. And the bar never had more than three patrons sitting at it at once.

         One of their most regular customers was sitting at the bar, as he was most nights rain, sleet or shine. Taeyong could never remember his name, but he knew he worked for some company down the block. He was nondescript and mule eyed in the way that so many lower ranked company workers are. Middle aged, still unable to claw his way up to a promotion, and now with the influx of newly graduated University students entering the work-field, unlikely to. No wonder he stumbled to a bar every night after getting off work. Everyone needed a way to cope. And he’d chosen his poison.

          Taeyong shook a bottle of soju until a little tornado kicked up inside the bottle, then he flipped it over, ramming the base of the bottle with the heel of his palm so it resounded with a satisfying crack. Throwing away the cap, Taeyong placed two shot glasses on the bar, pouring some soju into the customer’s glass and then allowing the patron to do the same to his own. They held their full shot glasses up and clinked them together.

         “Have faith, my friend. Good things are coming your way. You’ve been working at the company for so long, surely you’re more qualified than these wet-behind-the-ear college yuppies. Youth isn’t everything.” Taeyong said.

          The customer chuckled, his slowly balding crown glinting in the dim hanging lights.

         “That’s easy for someone young to say. What are you? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Youth is everything in this day and age. If I’m not accomplished in my late forties, I never will be. There’s nothing for me to do but float along until I die.” He sighed, and tossed back the booze. Taeyong did the same. Then he poured the man some more into his shot glass, though he felt a deep guilt as he did so, because the scarlet lettering that pulsed above the customer’s head read: **Liver Failure.** And of course it did. How could the man die of anything else, given how much he drank?

            Taeyong wondered if this made him complicit. If by pouring him another round, by taking his money and cracking open another bottle, he was murdering him slowly. He’d tried a few times to urge him to take it slow, maybe let his body rest for a few days. But the man always came back, not satisfied enough to leave until he was barely able to stand. This life style would kill him, and Taeyong always felt guilty about it.

          The night passed by in a slow blur, like a watercolor painting smeared before it had completely dried. Faces replacing faces in the barstools, bourbon over ice, the heat of soup gurgling over kerosene flames, shaking drink after drink and straining into cocktail glasses, birthday girls, college boys preening and trying their luck. By the time they were closing shop, Taeyong was drunk again; having sipped drinks all night with different customers. It was practically part of the job description for Taeyong to indulge his patrons by drinking with them, and lots of regulars had offered to buy him expensive glasses of whiskey that pushed up their overall sales quite a bit. But now he was in no condition to finish cleaning up the bar. Yuta sighed, dragging Taeyong to one of the barstools and sitting him down heavily.

          “I’ll wipe down the bar tonight. You just sit here. And please drink some fuckin water.” Yuta said as he walked back behind the bar to begin putting away the perishables in the fridge.

           Taeyong grumplily slurped his water. The world seemed to flex and waver as if seen through desert heat, and he was seeing two of everything. Johnny and Doyoung had finished cleaning up the restaurant section half an hour ago and had already left after dividing their tips. Only Taeyong and Yuta were left.

          Yuta finished cleaning the bar mats and flipped them upside-down so the water could drain out of the rubbery grooves.

          “Done.” Yuta said, flicking all of the bar lights off. “Let’s go home. I’ll put your ass in a cab. Don’t walk home in this state.”

           “Let’s take a cab together.” Taeyong slurred.

           “I live ten minutes away, why would I take a cab. Plus we’re going in the opposite direction, remember?” Yuta said, pulling Taeyong up and out of the door, locking it behind him.

          “Nono. Then I’ll walk you home first.” Taeyong said. Outside, the sun was starting to rise. It was six in the morning.

          “What the fuck, are you trying to court me or something? I can get home by myself.” Yuta grunted, raising his hand to hail a cab, and one stopped in front of them immediately. He opened the door and unceremoniously tossed Taeyong in, reaching over to buckle him into his seat like a child. Taeyong vaguely heard Yuta telling the cab driver his address.

           Yuta closed the door and Taeyong rolled the window down.

          “Go home, man. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Yuta said, and amused grin on his face. Taeyong was still seeing double. Two sunrises. Two or each cloud in the sky. Two Yuta’s looking down at him from outside the car window. That impish, warm smile. His bar-back, coworker, dear friend.

          Overtaken by an uncharacteristic flood of overt affection, Taeyong reached out through the car window, taking one of Yuta’s hands in his.

          “Stay away from empty streets.” Taeyong said as the driver rolled up the window and began to pull away, leaving a very bewildered Yuta alone on the sidewalk.

         Taeyong was drunk. He was seeing double. He sat back in his seat. Johnny and Doyoung, he never worried about. He saw that they would die of old age. But above Yuta’s head: **Stab Wounds.**

 

**~**

 

           Taeyong was dreaming. He knew he was dreaming. He had gotten home from the bar, peered into Mark’s room to see his brother, Jaemin and Jeno sleeping on the floor in a heap like dozing puppies, and then he’d fallen into his own bed without kicking off his shoes. He was sleeping. But he also knew the dream was real.

          He was in his own room, sitting on his bed, but somehow nothing was familiar. The clock on his bedside table was ticking backwards. The sand in the decorative hourglass paperweight was running back up towards the top, defying gravity and the rules of time all at once. Outside the window, where there should have been a glorious sunrise, there was only negative space; a blackness that stretched out as far as the eye could see. And the houses and trees in the distance were mere chicken-scratch white outlines, like the sketch of some lazy god.

           Taeyong got up from the bed and walked towards the hanging mirror. He peered inside, and as always with these dreams, he was reflected featureless. Just the outline of a man: no eyes, no lips, no clothes. Naked and nondescript. No red lettering over his own head. Why could he see nothing of himself? Why was his own fate the only mystery?

         “I know you’re here.” Taeyong said into the empty room, his own voice reverberating and somehow uncanny. He wanted to wake up, but he knew he couldn’t until _he_ let him wake. The clock ticking backwards. The hourglass sand trickling backwards. “Reaper.”

          For a moment, there was silence, just the mechanical tick tick tick of the clock moving slowly from 3pm to 2. And then all at once, Taeyong was not alone. He swiveled, and saw the tall dark figure there, perched irreverently on his desk, his head propped on his knee.

          Dressed from head to toe in black, he looked no older than his early twenties, though Taeyong had no way of knowing exactly how old he was. He could have existed for mere decades, or centuries. All Taeyong knew was that he would never find out.

          “Reaper? How impersonal. I’ve known you since you were a child. When will you start calling me by my name?” The reaper asked, a small, humorless smile on his lips.

          Taeyong knew this reaper’s name. Hansol. Its name was Hansol. But to name it felt too personifying. It was a tool of death, who knows how many lives it had taken in this night alone? Taeyong wouldn’t call its name. For all he knew, this reaper could be the one to take Yuta someday. To take Mark.

          “You haven’t come to me in a long time. What do you want?” Taeyong asked, trying not to stare in Hansol’s direction. This reaper was the only one Taeyong had ever met, though he knew there were many. Hansol had started coming to him in dreams ever since his power awakened, asking him strange probing questions. He’d been warm at first, but as Taeyong grew older and more distant, so too had the reaper.

         “Do I need a reason to visit an old friend? I just wanted to see how my favorite undertermined is doing.” Hansol said, getting off the desk and walking closer. Taeyong knew an undetermined was reaper lingo for a human with no fixed fate. Taeyong had no scarlet lettering above his head. No one knew how he would die, not even death itself.

           “You’re getting older. It should have appeared by now.” Hansol said, staring towards where the lettering should be. “If your fate were determined, your vision would disappear. I could wipe your memory of everything your power told you. You could be free of this.”

           “You don’t think I want that?” Taeyong muttered. He would do anything to forget the cause of everyone’s death if he could do nothing to save them. “So fucking tell me how.”

           The reaper was quiet, whether it be because he didn’t know, or if he couldn’t say, Taeyong didn’t know.

          “Tell me how, and I’ll fucking let you pick the way I die.” Taeyong said, his temper flaring.

          Hansol was looking down at him, his black clothing seeming to ripple as if made of dark waters.

          “Your powers are beginning to progress.” He said, the room beginning to flex and waver. Taeyong knew he was beginning to wake up. “I pity you, human.”

          “What do you mean by that?”

          The clock struck two.

          “Wait!”

          The sand had all risen backwards.

          Taeyong woke with a start, his heart hammering in his chest. He could smell Mark and his friends making lunch in the kitchen. Bright light was filtering through the curtains. He rolled onto his side with a groan, feeling the hangover beating down on his with open palms. And looked towards the desk where, in the dream that was also not a dream, the reaper had been perched. And beyond that, the hourglass. The sand had sunk back to the bottom, time running as it should.


	3. Scarlet Letters

Chapter 3

~

 

                The bar was slower than usual, even for a Monday, and the shitty weather was not helping. For the past week, lightning had knit across the sky and sent warm rain pelting all over the city. Only the most dedicated of drinkers was at their bar tonight. The resteraunt section in the back was empty as well except for three tables, and despite not being able to see them due to all the pillars, Taeyong could practically see Doyoung and Johnny yawning and watching the clock tick doggedly towards 3am.

                Taeyong sighed, cracking an egg over the sink and running the sun of it back and forth between the shells; careful not to break the yolk. He tipped the gelatinous egg-whites into the shaker over a few cubes of ice, and discarded the rest. They would be lucky if they made a hundred bucks in tips for the night with how slow it was, and his mind couldn’t help but churn with anxiety when he thought of that fancy private highschool tuition of Mark’s that was due soon. Sure, Mark said it didn’t matter. That a name brand school meant nothing to him, and that he would be just as high achieving in a public school.  And Taeyong was sure that was the case, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to give his kid brother the world while he was still alive and well.

                With a lazy hand, he poured whiskey and sour mix over the egg white and ice. Securing the lid shut, he tossed the shaker over his shoulder, shaking vigorously until he could hear the ice cubes breaking into a slush inside, and when he poured it into the glass, the egg had stiffened into a thick merenge, almost reminiscent of the foam of a latte. Perfect. A final grate of fresh lime zest and he placed the whiskey sour on the side table and rang the bell to let the servers know the drink was ready. Johnny appeared moments later, putting the drink on a tray to deliver to the back.

                “What are the chances we get to close shop early tonight?” Johnny asked, for once not boisterously energetic. There were dark half-moons under his eyes that suggested a very late night the night prior. Not surprising, as Taeyong and Yuta had both watched him get into the cab with a pretty young customer after last night’s shift.

                Taeyong sighed, looking up at the clock. At this rate, closing the restaurant section an hour or two early wouldn’t make much of a difference in revenue.

                “Do kitchen last calls at 2 am, and you can close down your section.” Taeyong said.

                “What about the bar?”

                “I’ll stick around for an extra hour, don’t sweat it.”

                The hours slurred past like a drunken tongue, and Taeyong soon found himself alone, having sent even Yuta home early. If no customers came in within the hour, he too would let himself go home early for once.

                Pushing back the strands of dark hair that had fallen before his eyes, Taeyong reached up to bring down the cabernet glasses to polish off their elegant slopes with a dry cloth.

It was tedious work, and his mind couldn’t help but wander. Lately, his strange lucid dreams had been becoming more and more frequent; that damn reaper appearing to him damn near every night with increasing levels of agitation.

                _Still nothing? Not even the suggestion of lettering? Not a wisp?_

But the answer was always no. Taeyong could clearly see everyone else’s scarlet lettering, but not his.

                _Maybe it means I’ll never die. Maybe I’m immortal. A God._  Taeyong would say sardonically, just to piss the reaper off. He didn’t feel like a God. Far from it, he felt smaller than anything. So insignificant, fate hadn’t even stopped to consider his end.

                _Those are dangerous words, human. Be careful._

                And the dreams were becoming more distorted each night, anything that once had mass reduced to faint scribbles that undulated like ink snakes. Only the hourglass paperweight held its shape, the sand spilling upwards despite gravity, counting down the hours before he could wake in a cold sweat, Mark sitting on the foot of his bed with an impossible amount of worry on his face. Taeyong was beginning to dread sleep, he dreaded seeing the reaper who asked the same unanswerable questions each night.

                A small tinkering bell dragged Taeyong away from his thoughts.

                “Still open?” A soft voice called from beyond the door. A furious smattering of rain pelting onto the floor.

                “Yes, yes. Come in. Welcome.” Taeyong called, hanging the wine glass back over his head and wiping his hands on his apron. “You’ve saved me from a night of monotony.”

                The customer moved towards the barstools, taking his rain jacket off and running his hands back and forth furiously over his jet black hair to loosen the droplets of rain.

                “So I’m the only customer, huh? Should I be honored, or ashamed at my dedicated alcoholism?” He said, sitting down heavily.

                “Honored, of course. What can I get you?” Taeyong asked, pushing a glass of ice water the patron’s way.

                The customer took a few moments to study the display of liquors behind Taeyong. The customer had the air of a Gangnam rich boy socialite. He was undeniably handsome, his face refined enough that they could be plastered on billboards selling colognes and swiss watches.

                After so many years working the bar circuit, Taeyong had fine tuned his ability to accurately profile his patrons, and he found himself doing it now, more out of boredom than anything: _Young, college aged. Probably comes from money, and has no problem throwing down for the big buck drinks. Too bad there are no pretty female customers tonight, or I could have probably easily cajoled him into bottle service. Will most likely go for a whiskey or bourbon. Perhaps gin. Definitely not the beer or soju type, too low brow._ Taeyong’s mind rambled at him, almost despite himself as he waited patiently for the customer to order.

                “I’ll have a…. double Macallan 12 year. Neat.” He said finally. Taeyong nodded, turning to bring the bottle of single malt whiskey down from the shelf. He was mildly surprised. He’d guessed correctly about the whiskey, but he was wrong about the price range. Macallan 12 was mid range, unpretentious but damned good. Definitely not the big sell he’d been hoping to make on this slow as shit night. It was almost not worth it to have stayed open….

                “Make that two. You could probably use a drink, being stuck in here alone during the monsoon.” The customer said.

                _Bingo._

Taeyong rung up two drinks on the tab and poured two double’s of whiskey, keeping one on his side of the bar, while pushing one to the patron.

                “Well, shall we cheers?” The customer said, lifting his drink.  

                “To what?”

                “To shelters from the rain? To roofs and central heating?”

                Taeyong chuckled, clinking his glass against the customer’s.

                “To infrastructure and modern amenities.” He said, for the first time taking a moment to really look at the customer. Perhaps he’d been wrong to assume the young man was some sort of heir to some huge inheritance. His clothes were modest and without flashy brand logos. Nothing decorated his wrists and throat, completely devoid of accessories aside from his piercings. And despite his good looks, his expression didn’t suggest any real awareness of the fact; no real arrogance.

And then he saw it.

For a moment, it felt as if his heart had ceased in his chest, a long silence where the steady thrumming should have been. And when it started again, his heart was going wild, beating much too quickly, as if it meant to beat itself to death. The customer had taken a sip and had placed his drink down, combing a hand through his hair as if to air dry it. But Taeyong hadn’t drunk yet, his glass was still hanging in the air, whiskey sloshing out of the sides and onto his hands. Distantly, he was aware that his hands had begun to quiver, but he was powerless to stop it because his _eyes._ His eyes.

                The customer looked up and frowned a little, vaguely concerned.

“What’s the matter my friend, war flashbacks?” He lightly joked, and Taeyong managed to focus on the stranger’s gentle brown eyes, those soft features that had initially seemed so aristocratic.

“Nu…no. I’m fine.” Taeyong stammered, bringing the glass to his lips and taking a long swig. He emptied the double shot in one go, and scrabbled behind him for the bottle. His eyes. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Whoa, whoa. Hard night?” The customer asked, genuinely confused as Taeyong refilled his own glass and raised it immediately to his lips, sputtering a little pathetically at the burn.

“Who are you? What is your name?” Taeyong asked, trying his damned hardest to act nonchalant, but he was certain there was a slight quiver in his voice. A thread of true fear that the tremor in his hands gave away.

 _Who are you? What kind of aggressive-ass question is that?_ His mind berated, but there was nothing he could do to take back those words now.

The customer tilted his head slightly to one side, like a confused cat; but after a moment, he seemed to decide to play along. He’d clearly seen stranger things in his life than a bartender suddenly losing their shit for no apparent reason. He supposed periodic mental breakdown came with the territory of any customer service job.

“Do you need a full bio? Damn, should I have brought my resume?” He jabbed. “My name is Jung Jaehyun. College student. Literature major with a slightly worrying drinking habit. Too many vices to count. Highly unemployable. Who are you?” He asked, returning the blunt question playfully.

Taeyong was aware that he was talking, but somehow his mind had disassociated and it was suddenly as if he was watching the exchange from afar, a discombobulated spirit. He was telling Jaehyun his name, reaching over the bar numbly to shake his hand. He could see the wild horror in his own eyes, and the amused confusion in Jaehyun’s. If the boy only knew. If only he could see what Taeyong could, he would have taken off without a backwards glance. But he couldn’t, and so he stayed and laughed and bought another round of drink as Taeyong tried to ignore the twining red letters above the young man’s head that forsaw the cause of his death: _Lee Taeyong. Lee Taeyong. Lee Taeyong._

~~

                Mark woke to an empty house. It was nearing 7am, which was late to be getting home, even by Taeyong’s standards.

                Mark was pacing around the house. He’d called his brother’s cell phone only to hear it ringing from his empty bedroom. The bastard had forgotten his god-damned phone again, and Mark was worried sick. His brother usually got home from the bar around 5am, and was asleep in his bed when Mark woke up to get ready for school. But this morning, Mark had woken to Taeyong’s room empty, his bed neatly made, an indication that he’d never come home.

                He was going to be late for school, but that didn’t matter. He couldn’t leave the house until his brother made it safely home, and he was just pacing around the kitchen like a beheaded chicken, utterly at a loss of what to do.

                When his phone rang, he dug it out eagerly, ready to berate his older brother straight into the grave for not letting Mark know where he was; but he was disappointed to see that it was Jaemin.

                “Hello?” He picked up, his voice noticeably dejected.

                _Mark! Where are you? Haven’t you left the house yet? Jeno and I are already at the bus stop.”_

“No, no. I’m still home.” He said.

                _Hurry up man, we’re going to be late for school. It’s midterms today._ Jeno said into the receiver, and Mark heard the two friends bickering trying to wrestle the phone from one another.

                _Is everything okay?_ Jaemin asked, his voice softening around the edges a bit. Mark smiled into the receiver. Of course Jaemin would be the one to worry about Mark’s emotional state while Jeno was concerned about him making it in time for the test. Jaemin and Jeno were like two sides to the same coin: Jeno was as practical as he was fastidious while Jaemin was scatterbrained but emotionally observant. They balanced one another perfectly, which explained why they were always attached at the hip. Mark knew he was lucky to have such great friends, but his mind was in overdrive worrying about his brother; and he couldn’t bring himself to speak anymore. This was so unlike Taeyong. His older brother often came home drunk, and sometimes not at all. But he was absolutely meticulous about letting Mark know where he was and why so that he wouldn’t worry.

                “Yes, I’m fine. Get on the bus without me. I’ll catch up soon. See you in class.” He said, hanging up the phone without waiting for an answer. He spent the next ten minutes or so trying to distract himself. He ground some coffee beans and placed the grinds in the machine so it would be ready to brew as soon as his brother needed it. He watered the plants, all the while glancing periodically back at the clock that was steadily ticking onward with no brother in sight.

                It was nearly 7:15 when Mark heard the keys jangling on the lock outside. He heard the telltale jangle as the keys fell, and his brother’s loud, garbled cursing.

                Mark ran to the door, ripping it open to reveal his older brother on his knees, feeling around pathetically for the keys. Taeyong looked up at him with heavily lidded eyes, his handsome face absolutely haggard from lack of sleep.

                “Oh hello baby brother!” Taeyong said, getting onto his feet, tripping over the threshold and into the house. He leaned his body heavily on Mark’s, and immediately the younger was overcome with the scent of whiskey.

                “What the fu—” Mark grunted, pushing his brother off of him and propping him against the wall. His head just lolled forward like a ragdoll, eyes firmly fixed on the floor. “Where have you been! Why didn’t you even message me to let me know if you weren’t going to be home until now?”

                “Sorry. Drinking. With a customer. Work…”

                “Yeah tell me something I don’t know.” Mark scoffed. This wasn’t an excuse, but Mark felt his fury dissipating rapidly into an unsettling mixture of relief and worry. Drunk Taeyong was one thing, but there was something off about him today.

                “Hey.” Mark said, toning down his voice as he tried to look his older brother in the face. Taeyong was still looking fixedly at the floor, so Mark bent down, forcing eye contact. Taeyong blinked furiously for a few moments, very oddly settling for a moment on a spot just above Mark’s head, before unexpectedly trying to twist his body away from him, backing up as if he were hurting. He rubbed furiously at his eyes with the heels of his palm, until the skin reddened and swelled.

                “Don’t… Don’t make me look at you.” He groaned, trying to turn away.

                “Hyung, what the hell?” Mark said, running forward to grasp at his brother’s wrists. His brother’s breath was quickening and Mark knew it right away for what it was: a panic attack. His older brother had suffered from severe anxiety and panic disorder since he was a child. Mark had seen Taeyong’s bouts of panic often, he remembered how bad it used to be, the way he would gnaw his fingers and wrists bloody and tear at his hair. But he’d gotten better with age, and though the anxiety had never left, Mark hadn’t seen his brother have a panic attack in years.

                “I want it to f-fucking stop, Mark.” Taeyong rambled, and Mark was lost without context. He didn’t know or care about what triggered this. He just knew that Taeyong was very, very unwell right now.

                “Shh… shhh…”

                “Am I being punished for something? Am I bad?”

                “Hyung, stop.”

                “I mean, I always knew I was a sh-shitty person, but I would never…. I could never..” He seemed to lose control of his words and crumpled into himself again.

                “It’s okay. Breathe.” Mark said, pulled Taeyong’s hands away from his eyes to realize with a dull ache that his older brother was crying. His initial anger when his brother had first come home blinded him to it, but now it was so clear. Taeyong had been crying, probably for a long time before coming home. His eyes were puffy and red and bloodshot. What the hell had happened?  “What can I do hyung? How can I help you?”

                Taeyong was breathless, his heart racing, but somehow he managed to speak.

                “Th-the Klonopin..”

                “Where?”

                “Drawer.. my…room..”

                Mark helped Taeyong slide down the wall into the floor before running to his room. He opened all of the bedside drawers, rooting around inside. It was overladen with junk: loose receipts, pocket change, advertisements, condoms. But finally, in the corner, he felt the small vial of pills rolling around on its side. He pulled the orange vial out, shaking a small blue tablet with the telltale K stamped on its face. He ran back to his brothers side, who took the pill, swallowing it dry before Mark could run to get him a glass of water. Immediately after taking the pill, Taeyong brought his knees to his chest, burying his face and trying to breathe deeply, dragging each lungful slowly between his teeth. Mark lost track of how much time passed like this, sitting crouched next to his anxiety addled and still very drunk older brother before the medication finally seemed to kick in and Taeyong unfurled. His eyes were still red, but he wasn’t crying anymore; and his breathing was under control. His eyes were a little out of focus, obviously he was feeling the sedation of the klonopin, but at least the worst of his panic seemed to be over.

                “Hyung?”

                “I’m okay.” Taeyong said slowly, his speech a bit slurred. “Please, some water.”

                Mark handed over the glass that was still undrunk at his side, watching his brother knock the whole thing back. He set the empty glass down, wiping clumsily at his lips. In this moment, Mark saw his brother for what he really was: just a twenty-two year old who was in way over his head with substance issues and mental health problems. A very young man who gave up his own education to put his younger brother through private schooling. Barely an adult, and somehow already playing surrogate father to a teen. He’d never looked so small, drugged up and cried out on the kitchen floor.

                “I’m sorry.” Mark said, pushing some sweat matted strands of hair away from his brother’s face. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

                Taeyong waved his hand, dismissing the apology. Slowly he looked towards the clock. It was almost eight.

                “Why are you here? Why aren’t you at school?” Taeyong asked slowly.

                “I was waiting for you.”

                The klonopin kept Taeyong from feeling guilty, it kept him from feeling much of anything except a profound drowsiness.

                “If you’re feeling better hyung, I have to go. We’re testing today, and I probably missed a portion already….” Mark said, heaving Taeyong up by the arm and stumbling towards the bedroom to lay his older brother out of his bed. “Drink some water and sleep everything off, hyung. You have a lot of explaining to do when I get home from school.”

                Taeyong absently was aware that Mark was tucking him in, that he was still talking. But he could hardly register any of it. His eyes were shutting despite themselves, and he hoped against hope that he would not have any dreams. He wanted to sleep like the dead. He wanted to sleep and sleep, and wake up in a life that was not his.

                “Don’t take a cab. Don’t take the bus. Walk.” Taeyong muttered before he plummeted into sleep.

                For a long while, Mark couldn’t bring himself to leave. He sat on the foot of his bed, staring at his brother’s face feeling an almost impossible guilt. How would his life have been if he hadn’t been burdened with raising Mark? He was so bright, surely he’d be enrolled in university, dating, pulling just a few hours at a part time job and having enough time to meet with friends and goof off in the evening. Hell, he probably could have even pursued a job in entertainment with a face like his. Instead he was pulling twelve hour shifts at a local bar just to make rent and  his brother’s tuition, his social life decimated, his youth running through his fingers. And for what? Him? Mark had never felt more ashamed.

                Sighing, he scribbled a note on a piece of paper: _I ground some coffee beans and put them in the machine. It’s all ready to brew, just press start.  Love, Mark._

He put the note on Taeyong’s desk for when he woke up with a furious hangover and need for caffeine, pinning it down on the desk with the heavy hourglass paperweight before heading out the door where the car horns blared their fury at the early morning traffic.


	4. In Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we get the obligatory nightmare sequence. Thank you for reading <3

~~

Chapter 4

~~

 

                When Ten stumbled into the kitchen to make breakfast, he was surprised to see the telltale lump of blankets on the couch that suggested Jaehyun had crashed. He smiled, walking over to the couch to adjust the blankets over his friend. Jaehyun was sleeping like the dead, one arm slung over his eyes to block the light, his black hair touseled and fanned out over the armrest; lovely in the way only Jae could be even in the deepest cycle of his sleep. No wonder he was jokingly nicknamed the campus prince. He looked like the fantasy of every girl at their uni; tall with aristocratic features.  If only they knew that their prince was a broke couch surfer with nothing but kindness and a brilliant mind to his name.

                “Hey, rise and shine sleeping beauty.” Ten said, shaking Jaehyun gently. “We’ve got Cold War Literature lecture in an hour.”

                Jaehyun moaned, rubbing his eyes furiously before sitting up. He still reeked of whiskey from the night before, and his eyes were furiously bloodshot.

                “Rough night?” Ten asked, leaning over the back of the sofa. Jaehyun was pushing his hair back from his eyes, standing up groggily like he wasn’t sure quite how he’d ended up where he had.

                “You can say that.” He said, his voice gravelly. “Can I use your shower?”

                “Of course.” Ten answered with a chuckle. Jaehyun was really too polite. After their years and years of friendship, it was almost stupidly courteous to ask such a question. Ten had given him the key to his apartment, for christ’s sake. “You are welcome to whatever the fuck you’d like.”

                Jaehyun smiled his trademark warm smile before pushing himself off of the sofa and towards the bathroom.

                “I hope you have an appetite, I’m going to make breakfast.” Ten called as he heard the faucet crank on.

                “I always have an appetite.” Jaehyun said before closing the door, and Ten could hear him singing softly in the shower; some silly made up song with nonsensical lyrics.

                Rolling up his sleeves, Ten meandered to the kitchen, deciding that a simple omelette would have to do. He cracked a few eggs into a bowl and whisked furiously with a little full fat milk, cracking in some salt and fresh pepper. With deft hands, he julienned some basil and pancetta, folding it all in gently with the egg before transferring it all into a very lightly buttered, heated pan. Ten loved to cook. It was the ritual of it all that comforted him, the ability to work with his hands and have perfect control over everything that happened before him, at least for that tiny stretch of time before plating and consumption. He so rarely had control of his life, so these twenty minutes or so of perfect agency was what fueled him throughout the day.

                Though he supposed he shouldn’t complain about a lack of order in his life. If anyone had the right to complain about that, it was Jaehyun.

                Gently, Ten rolled the omelette in half, and then once over again until it was a perfect cylinder. Cutting it in half, he plated them, sprinkling shaved parmesan on top for good measure. Jaehyun was a cheese fanatic, and would surely appreciate the touch.

                They had been friends since their early teen years, the two of them. When Ten had first immigrated to Korea, when he was small and didn’t speak the language and was ostracized by all of his peers, it had been Jaehyun who had extended his friendship. They’d been thick as thieves for the entirety of their formative years. They had seen each other through the most awkward stages of their adolescence, through lovers and heartbreak and tribulations. When they both got accepted into the same university, Ten had assumed that the friendship would continue as usual, but it hadn’t.  Ten didn’t want to admit it to himself, but in the last few years, they had drifted apart. Ten wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. All he knew was that shortly after graduating high school, Jaehyun had a huge falling out with his parents. They had cut him off from his large inheritance, and his father had basically disowned him. Ten was not sure what the circumstances were. All he knew was that Jaehyun was suddenly broke, that he attended college classes by day, and roamed the streets by night. When he saved up enough money from his library internship, he splurged on a week or two at a ratty love motel, but more often than not, he slept in bathhouses, subway stations, wherever he could have a roof over his head with little to no price. If this hurt him, if Jae was tired or frightened or angry about his sudden change of fortune, he never expressed it. This was just the type of person Jaehyun was: steadfast, independent, staunchly opposed to burdening others; even if it meant distancing himself from his best friend.

                Ten had lost count of how many times he had suggested Jaehyun just live with him. He had a perfectly good couch, and it wouldn’t cost Jae a dime. But Jaehyun was just too polite to impinge upon his friend’s home like that. He was many things: homeless, broke, very possibly an alcoholic. But he was no freeloader.

                “Wow, it smells amazing chef.” Jaehyun said, coming into the kitchen with a towel draped carelessly over his sopping wet hair. He brought with him, heat, his skin still flushed and steaming; the scent of lavender and honey. Ten waved away the compliments, setting the two plates down on the table with two steaming cups of black coffee with cinnamon; just like Jaehyun always took his morning cup.

                For a while, the two ate in comfortable silence, just relishing each other’s company. Somehow, this was both terribly familiar and foreign to Ten. In the past few months, Ten had seldom seen Jaehyun outside of classes. There were a million and one things he wanted to ask him: Why did your father cut you off? What did you guys fight about so intensely that he disowned you? Are you happy and safe? Why don’t you confide in me like you used to do? But none of these questions struck the right cord within him, so Ten settled on an open ended statement instead:

                “Your mother called me a few days ago Jae.” Ten said carefully, cutting the buttery egg with the side of his fork.

                Jaehyun paused his chewing for a fraction of a second, just that moment of consideration told Ten that he’d made the right choice bringing up his mother rather than father. Jaehyun had always been closer to his mother.

                “Oh?” Jaehyun said, not asking more but not curtailing the conversation.

                “Yeah. She’s worried sick Jae. She says you haven’t called her in months.” Ten said, sipping the coffee and relishing the warm red notes the cinnamon imparted.

                “She hasn’t called me either.” Jaehyun said, his voice matter of fact, un-bitter.

                “No, but she asked me about you. About how you’ve been staying afloat.”

                “And what did you tell her?” Jaehyun asked, steadily eating.

                “I… I told her that I don’t know. That I hardly ever see you anymore either.” Ten said.

                “That’s all?” Jaehyun asked, for the first time, Ten could detect a barb in his voice.

                “Yes, yes. Really man, I wouldn’t tell her anything you wouldn’t tell her yourself.” And that was the truth. Ten could hardly tell his mother that her son was basically bumming around Seoul doing god knows what, eating convenience store noodles for every meal. It would hurt her to know that, but more importantly, it would hurt Jaehyun.

                “Seriously though man, what have you been up to? I barely ever see you outside of lecture anymore.” Ten said, trying his best to not let the worry bleed into his voice, but of course it did. Ten was transparent, easy to read. The polar opposite of Jaehyun.

                “I’ve been well. As far as cities go, Seoul is a pretty swell city to be a bum in.” Jaehyun said lightly. “The bathhouses are dirt cheap and don’t kick you out, even if you fall asleep in the common areas. The love motels are okay too, although the walls shake at night and the ceilings are covered in mirrors, which is creepy. Sometimes, if the janitors finish up cleaning early at my internship, I can sneak in a night in the library broom closet where there are no cameras.”

                “Oh, Jae…” Ten breathed, but Jaehyun waved away his concern.

                “When I say storage closet it sounds more cramped than it is. It’s not half bad if I spread a blanket on the floor. Almost luxurious if I do say so myself. A broom suite, really.”

                This was typical Jaehyun behavior, to deflect every uncomfortable topic with humor.

                “Cut the crap man, you don’t have to live like this. I have a perfectly good couch that you can crash on for as long as you…”

                “So I had the strangest night last night.” Jaehyun abruptly cut through Ten’s words like a knife, clearly finished with that conversation. A part of Ten was tempted to push the topic, but he wasn’t sure Jaehyun wouldn’t flat out just leave if he did. He dropped it with a sigh, deciding to indulge his friend’s diversion.

                “What happened last night?”

                “I was at that dive bar a few blocks down, the one in the cellar with all the vintage records on the wall? It was empty as hell, just me and the bartender. The bartender looked like he was damn about to fall asleep into the sink, I felt sorry for the guy so I bought him some drinks. We were going in to cheers, and I swear the guy took one look at me and went into an epileptic fit right before my eyes.”

                “What?”

                “Yeah, you would think he saw a ghost or something. One moment he was totally fine, we were talking and introducing ourselves, and then the moment he takes a good look at me, he starts to fucking shake. I swear, he started shaking so hard he spilled half of the whiskey in his glass. He was sweating too, his eyes got all blown wide and frightened. He kept looking just over my head, like there was something there that freaked him out.  It was the weirdest thing.”

                “Huh. So what did you do?” Ten asked, scraping the last of the food from his plate.

                “I played along of course. I love a good spectacle.”

                “You would, troublemaker.” Ten said, and Jaehyun smiled that lovely sunshine smile that he was known for in their childhood. That smile that turned his eyes into crescent moons.

                “I’m probably going to go back soon, see if I can figure out why he had that reaction to meeting me.” Jaehyun said.

                “That curious, huh?”

                Jaehyun smirked, draining the last of his coffee.

                “Ten, you know me. I love anything I can’t explain.”

~

                This dream is different. There is no serenity, no nondescript outlines of objects in sepia-toned light, no tea-stained landscapes. This dream is technicolor and awful. He’s in the middle of the street, parades of people marching past him without faces. Mouthless, eyeless people, who have slabs of smooth granite where the features should be. Above their blank heads in coiling red: _Car accident. Cancer. Stroke. Heart attack. Suicide. Suicide. Suicide. Liver failure. Gun shout wounds. Overdose. Blunt force trauma._ A litany for every way things could and would go wrong. He didn’t want to see anymore. He never asked for this gift.

                He was being jostled forward by the faceless crowd towards a burning city, bright flames arcing across the sky, scorching the backs of his corneas with their brilliance, but still, he couldn’t wake up. And then suddenly a familiar face, Yuta is walking beside him. His red lettering is pulsing, almost painfully bright. _Stabbed. Stabbed. Stabbed._

                “Taeyong, don’t let me out of your sight.” He says, the lilt in his accent so wonderfully familiar. “The minute I’m out of your sight, it’s over.” He grabs Taeyong’s wrists, tight, insistent. “Don’t look back. Don’t.”

                And then a familiar wail rises from behind him. A voice he remembers all too well from his childhood.

                _Mom._

 _There’s nothing there. There are no monsters, there…/_ A slap/ _…isn’t. Why are you still crying, why.. /_ Another slap, harder/ _can’t you just be normal. I’m tired of this, I’m so, so tired.. /_ a dull thud, like a body hitting the hardwood floor/ _…did everything I could and no one gives a shit…_

 _“_ Taeyong don’t look back.” Yuta said, but how could Taeyong not want to see his mother one last time.

                He looks back

                And sees his mother pummeling his young body. She is in hysterics. He is covering his eyes and not making a sound. This was the last time he saw her. This was the night before she lost custody of he and Mark. Taeyong could smell her familiar white musk perfume. Then abruptly the scene dissolves into salt, taking her voice with it. And Yuta is no longer holding onto his wrist. Taeyong turns, wild eyed, looking for his friend but no one is there. Just a puddle of blood, so viscous it coats his shoes like jam. Just a knife in the center like a steel island.

                A dry sob tears itself from his throat, and he backs away from the bloody scene, he is hyperventilating. The city behind him is still burning, the crowds still pulse past, corralling him along until the blood stained ground is a mere speck in the distance.

                And then suddenly he feels another body enveloping his. That stranger from the bar wordlessly holding him as to forgive or to comfort him. But for what? Did he do something wrong?

                Yes. Wrong. He was wrong. His entire existence was wrong. A mistake. And now this beautiful stranger with the warm smile would lose his life because of him.

                “I’m sorry.” Taeyong whimpers, knowing this is a dream, that as terrifying as this is, it’s all in his head. But he still needs to say it. Still needs to apologize for the inevitable.

                “What are you sorry for?” Jaehyun asks. His voice is milk and honey. It’s all he wants to soothe his terror.

                “For causing your death. For killing you.”

                A hard shove causes Taeyong to fall to his knees. Asphalt. Car oil. Horns.

                He looks up, and there he is: his little brother. Mark’s black hair ignited almost blue in the headlights.

                “Hyung why didn’t you warn us?” He asks, his voice strangely effervescent. The highbeams are getting brighter, more intense.

                “Mark!” Taeyoung shouts. He wants to run and push him out of the way, but his feet are firmly rooted to the ground and he cannot move.

                “Didn’t you want us to live?” Mark asks right before the truck barrels into him with a crack of splintering bone.

 

~

                Taeyong jerks awake from the nightmare with the sound of truck horns still blaring in his ears. He has just enough time to run to the bathroom to dry heave nothing into the toilet until the vessels in his eyes burst and bloom.

                He’s scared shitless. He’s more frightened than he’d ever been. More so, even than when the curse first manifested. He could feel the clock of his loved ones lives ticking doggedly towards the end, and he’s powerless to stop it.

                He is useless. Useless, and no one knows it.

               

 

         


	5. Jaehyun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: TRIGGER WARNING for sexual assault references all throughout this chapter. Thank you for reading, despite darkness. I always love to hear your feedback :)

~

Chapter 5

~

                Jaehyun hadn’t been lying to Ten when he said he didn’t mind bumming around so much yet. Despite his rich upbringing, his core was still very much made for vagabonding. In his parents lavish home in Gangnam, he owned very little that he cared about. So when the time came that his father cast him out, his mother sobbing on their driveway, Jaehyun had been able to leave with a single duffel bag stuffed with essentials: clothes, toiletries, undergarments. And of course, the only real thing that mattered: his books and journals.

                During the mornings, Jaehyun plays the part of the prince of his campus: he dodges the swoons and clumsy advances of the female and sometimes male cohort. He attends counsels and classes, and he does brilliantly as his mother always knew he would. The perfect son in all ways but one. Afternoons, he spends at his library internship, combing through catalogs, making inventory of the titles in their rare book collections, happily getting lost in the stacks until the scent of old paper and printing presses of the past saturates his skin. So many worlds to travel to just by following the ink. Whenever he opens a book to read, he cups the spine gently, like a lover; noses the seam where the pages gather. He’s in love. He’s unsure why he thought he’d ever needed more company than parchment and ink. Alone. He’s always alone, and happy for it.

                Happy, he tells himself. Happy for the first goddamned time.

                Nevermind that he could still feel the sting of his father’s backhand whenever he gave his mind a minute to be idle. Nevermind that he could still hear the dinnerplates shattering, or his mother’s panic. It didn’t matter that he could still hear his father’s voice raging almost unintelligibly: _No son of mine… no fucking son of mine would…_

No. He didn’t care anymore.

                Nights were tricky and varied. Sometimes, if Jaehyun was lucky, the janitors would finish up their cleaning before he had finished reorganizing the stacks, and he would be able to lock up the library and seek refuge in the broom closet: the only room without a cctv camera. Usually he had no such luck, and had to play it by ear.

                Tonight, it is raining hard. He imagines the only subway stations unpatrolled enough for him to sleep without getting run off by security is flooded by now. He reaches into his pocket and uncrinkles the money in his wallet. He’s been saving for quite a bit now, and can probably afford a few nights at one of the dingier love motels. He goes to the rattiest one he knows because it is dirt cheap. Love motels, afterall, were not really intended for extended stays. They were for one night escapades after the clubs and bars closed down, and people wanted to fuck but had no private place to do it. Jae always received very strange looks from the host when he arrived, handsome as he is, alone. In front of him in line, a pair in party clothes lean on each other arm in arm. The man seems sober enough, but the woman is so blitzed she is hardly standing, her entire body reeking of alcohol as if she bathed in soju. He’s holding her up, while she babbles nonsense in his ear, her head lolling; and Jaehyun wonders for a long moment about consent and drunkenness. If she even knows who he is, or where she is, or what is about to happen in this little neon pink shithole in the wrong side of town.

                Jaehyun receives his keys, and realizes with a dull thud that they are in neighboring motel rooms.

                _Maybe they’re actually a couple, and the girl got too drunk. Maybe they just need a place to crash._

But as Jaehyun lies down on the stupid circular bed, staring up at that obscene mirror on the ceiling, he begins to hear the creaking in the next room. The telltale thump, thump, thump of the headboard knocking against his adjacent wall. And he hears moaning, but only one voice. The male’s voice, saying “Yes, fuck, fuck”; but the woman is silent. Unnervingly so. Drunk? Passed out? Maybe just very, very quiet in bed? The headboard continues to knock against his wall, a clumsy, inexpert tempo, and the woman continues to be silent.

                _Fuck, this is so fucked up._

For a while Jaehyun just lies there, listening in disgust; his own guilty reflection looking down on him on those pink bed sheets, black hair fanned out on the pillow. Alone. Listening to what may or may not be non-consensual sex coming from the next room.

                He thinks again and again about intervening, but doesn’t.

                Maybe he’s overreacting, maybe nothing wrong at all is happening in the next room. But Jaehyun still can’t help but feel nauseous.

                _Fuck, I can’t be here right now._

He remembers that bar just a few blocks away with the vintage records and that weird, tweaky bartender. He remembers his impish curiosity.

                Jaehyun stands, throwing on a jacket, and heads out the door.

 

~

 

                Taeyong looks a little worse for wear today, or at least, even more so than usual. Yuta glances over at his friend wiping the dust off of the bottles of liquor. The dark circles are almost purple, and for whatever reason, he seems to be avoiding looking Yuta full on in the face.

                Yuta doesn’t push it. He’s very perceptive in that way. In a lot of ways, Taeyong is like his sister. Private, a little meek, with the tendency to shrivel in on themselves when probed with hard questions. His tactic for comforting them is the same: quiet support. Just the knowledge that he is around and willing to listen, if they want to talk.

                “So the insomnia is back huh?” Yuta asks, glancing at Taeyong again. The handsome bartender just nods, putting the bottle of Talisker whiskey back on the third shelf.

                “I guess you can say that. When I do sleep, I have nightmares.”

                Yuta carefully slices some lemons and limes into near wedges, placing them in the tray as garnish. The bar is slow again today, only one middle aged customer at the corner booth; but he hardly counts anymore. He’s literally there every night, poor soul.

                “You know, there is a certain folklore that people who have lots of nightmares have a lot of good luck coming their way.” Yuta says, and then nudges the bartender playfully. “Perhaps a bevy of beautiful ladies?”

                Taeyong chuckles.

                “Ah, I doubt it.”

                The two work in silence for a bit. Johnny loudly goads Taeyong to make four old fashions faster than humanly possible, while Yuta cleans up a martini glass he dropped while trying to make a cosmo.

                In actuality, there is a reason why Taeyong refuses to look Yuta in the dead on in the face today. Ever since that very visceral nightmare he had a few nights ago that had made him wake up heaving out his guts, Yuta’s red lettering had gotten a bit brighter than before. Just bright enough that it strained his eyes a little to look at it; not that it wasn’t unpleasant enough before. This was a new phenomenon. Taeyong had never seen the red lettering change in any way in all the years he’d had this power. And it was unsettling to say the least. Taeyong wasn’t sure what it meant. But he knew he didn’t like it.

                “How is your sister?” Taeyong asked abruptly.

                “My.. sister?” Yuta sked, taken aback. He finishes up the lemons, and goes on to place some hibiscus flowers in a jar. The vibrant petals were edible and used as garnish in some of their fancier drinks.

                “My sister is, well… she’s in highschool. Moody little shit, lately. Too cool to stay on the phone with her big brother for long.” Yuta chuckled, his words as pointed as always, but Taeyong could hear the love in his voice clear as a morning bell.

                “You should go home soon, Yuta. It’s been a few months since you’ve been back to Japan.” Taeyong says, daring a quick glance up to be confronted with those terrible letters. He looks back down to the orange he is muddling.

                “Home? Is this your way of firing me?” Yuta jokes, ringing the bell on the sidetable to let Johnny and Doyoung know the drinks for their table are ready.

                “No, of course not.” Taeyong laughs. “I just—”

                The sound of the door opening shuts down their conversation.

                “Hi, welcome to Cellar!” Yuta calls out to the figure near the door. Taeyong turns with a thud to see it is that young man again from a few nights prior. The one with the aristocrat’s face and mischievous grin and playful verbal barbs. The one with the red lettering: _Lee Taeyong._

 _Fuck._ Taeyong thinks, remembering his enormously obvious panic the first time they met. _Fuck, fuck. Fuck._

At least Yuta is here this time. And he’s determined not to lose his cool.

                “Good to see you again Jaehyun.” Taeyong says as the young man takes a seat at the bar. “Another double Macallan 12 year, neat?”

                Jaehyun smiles warmly. It’s striking how quickly that warm, kind smile can switch to impish and playful. Not entirely unlike Yuta, in all honesty.

                “Make it two.” He says, before his eyes slide towards Yuta. “Actually, three. One for the bar hand as well.”

                Yuta gives an appreciative nod, reaching over the bar to shake Jaehyun’s hand and introduce himself.

                “Thanks for the drink, sir big bucks.” Yuta says as Taeyong lines up three rock glasses to pour the whiskey.

                “Sir big bucks? Hardly.” Jaehyun says, picking up his glass of amber liquor. “Booze is pretty much all I spend money on.”

                “I’ll just nod and pretend that’s not a problem.” Yuta says, earning a small chuckle from Jaehyun.

                “Please do.”

                The three cheers and take the drink down slowly, relishing the burn and deep smokey notes. It burns Jaehyun so good, he forgets about what may or may not be happening at the love motel he’s staying in. The empty, one sided moaning. It burns so good, he feels happy and full, even without having eaten. Deep down, he knows this is an issue. He knows that the endless thrumming in his system for liquor is a bag thing, especially at his young age. But shit, if he hasn’t done worse.

                And the booze is fortifying Taeyong’s nerves, enough to take a good look at these two people standing on opposite sides of the bar: Yuta and Jaehyun, engaged in some conversation about writing and literature. Yes, both of their red lettering is clearly visible to Taeyong, but Yuta’s is definitely brighter than Jaehyun’s. But what does that mean? And why all of a sudden.

                Taeyong makes a mental note to ask the reaper Hansol about it later, if his dreams let him.

                Jaehyun too, is perceptive. He keeps up the conversation with Yuta, bantering and locking wits, but he doesn’t let his attention stray too far from Taeyong. That enigmatic, tweaky, unknowable bartender. Yes, he’s calmer today, but he’s still acting strangely; his eyes glazed as if in his own little world. His eyes trained firmly, firmly at the spot right above both his and Yuta’s head as if to find a nimbus there. What is he looking for at the spot right above hairlines? What does he imagine he sees? Jaehyun isn’t sure, but he wants to know. He was built to study, to try to understand everything that could not be explained. And he was determined to figure Taeyong out.

                By the time Jaehyun leaves the bar, it is creeping towards morning, just shy of 5am. The sky is lightening to a periwinkle so lovely it hurts. In the morning light, even that stupid, dingy love motel doesn’t look so bad. And the prospect or a bed… a real bed despite its undoubtable cum stains and circular shape too short to accommodate his long legs, sounded like heaven in his drunken stupor. As he reaches his room and fumbles for his keys, a woman spills out from the motel room next to his. Her face is a mess of running mascara and smudged lipstick, and Jaehyun remembers her from the night before. Drunk and barely standing in line for the motel keys with that unnervingly sober man propping her up. She’s wearing the same sequined party dress from the night before, but today, she doesn’t look beautiful. She looks ruined. And Jaehyun remembers. Of course he does. And he pieces together what he had tried to hard to explain away and deny the night before.

                The singular male moaning. The knock knock knock of the bed frame against his wall. His own damned reflection in the ceiling mirror staring down at him.

                She drops her purse, and things go rolling out of it: her keys, lipstick, her wallet, random credit cards. She curses, and falls to her knees, urgently shoving them back into the purse; sobbing. Jaehyun bends to help her, and she barely acknowledges. She’s on her feet as if to make a run for it, and he takes hold of her wrist, gently.

                “Are you okay, miss?” He whispers, hoping his drunken slurring isn’t too obvious. He does his best to sound comforting. “Can I do anything for you?”

                She looks down at his hand looped around her wrist, and as if terrified, she pulls away, so hard she almost falls backwards.

                “Don’t touch me!” She whimpers before turning to practically sprint down the stairs and out of his sight, leaving Jaehyun stunned and hurt in front of his door. Her words ring like a siren over and over again in his head, and just underneath, he can hear his own younger voice whimpering the same thing. Over and over again, like a litany of no: _Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me._  

                And nobody had cared.

                It’s a long time before Jaehyun can muster up the will power to open the door to his own room and fall on the bed, crying for the first time in months. He just stares and stares at that door from which the young woman ran out of. Where he heard her being trespassed upon, and chose to do nothing.

                He is guilty, and wants to be forgiven.


	6. Confluence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As with the last chapter, I'd like to emphasize the trigger warning for this chapter for sexual assault. Thank you all for reading this story, despite the angst. I know it's a slow burn, but it's going to pick up very soon, as will the romance to balance out all the sadness.

~~

Chapter 6

~~

 

                It is not the sun that wakes Jaehyun, but his little beat up Nokia cell phone bleating beside his ears. He groans, opening his heavy eyes, for a moment unsure of where he is. In his sleep and still whiskey addled mind, he almost imagines himself in his childhood bedroom, those bleak white walls with a singular crucifix over the door. But it’s loud. Too loud to be that austere home he’d known during his formative years. He hears human voices, and the rattle of the train tracks; and when his vision unblurs itself, he finds himself staring up at his reflection in the ceiling mirror.

_This place. The love motel. God fucking damnit._

He looks wrecked, he even fell asleep with his shoes on, for God sakes. But mostly, his eyes give it away. They are puffy and red and bloodshot; blooming with spider-webbed veins all throughout his sclera. He looks like he got what he deserved, which is a beating.

Clumsily, Jaehyun punches the buttons randomly on his phone until it accepts the call and by a stroke of luck, puts it on speaker phone.

_Jung Jaehyun, where are you?_

Ten’s voice. And if he’s addressing him by his full name, he’s angry.

Jaehyun mumbles something nondescript in response before finally bleating: “Motel.”

_You’re supposed to be giving a key note speech. Where the fuck are you?_

Ambivalently, Jaehyun remembers that he’d been coerced by one of his professors into being one of the representatives of his university at some conference about post-colonial Korean literature. He was supposed to be at Seoul University this very moment, acting out the part of model student and academic of contemporary literature. He knew his reputation around school: the gifted one. The one with his beautiful writing and lovely way of speaking, who studied seldom but always came out onn top. But that wasn’t what he was. He was a vagabond in a love motel who drank himself into sweet oblivion most nights of the week. He eschewed responsibility like it was going out of style. And he didn’t care.

After all, this wouldn’t be the first time he’d blown off a serious academic commitment. Hell, his professors were probably half expecting this by now, and had planned for backups.

“Not going.” He mumbled into the phone brusquely.

_Jae what do you mean you’re not—_

“I said I’m not going. Tell them you’re going to fill in for me.” He said, trying to block out the obvious hurt in Ten’s voice at his harsh tone.

_Jaehyun, you know I can’t… you can’t keep—_

Jaehyun hangs up, throwing the phone so it hits the opposite wall and clatters to the floor. He half expects Ten to call back and berate him. Jaehyun waits, and waits; listening to the voices of the motel guests milling around outside. He remembers bits and flashes of the night before, and feels the blue rising in his throat, in his lungs. He’s drowning, and he wants to be saved.

 _Call me back._ He thinks, knowing it’s ridiculous. He hung up on Ten. He’d blown off his responsibilities and thrown the phone at the wall.

_Call me back._

He remembers the headboard knocking against the wall. The woman in line barely conscious as the man ran his hands down her back, propping her up. Emptiness. Every red flag he heard, but did nothing to intervene. And then her eyes when he’d caught her fleeing from the scene of her rape in the morning, his face reflected in her own when she’d begged him not to touch her. He wants to hear Ten’s voice, or anyone’s.

_Call me back. Please call me back._

But there is only silence.

Jaehyun’s not sure when he has started to cry, but suddenly he can’t stop; the sobs wracking his whole body in tremors. He cradles his own face in his hands, marveling at how thin the veil of his own composure was. But here it is: torn. After everything, after all these months of the streets. After being betrayed by his family, the entirety of his life being reduced to a duffel bag and a fourth of liquor; he breaks now. How funny, he thinks; that a life-times worth of fortifying his walls can be ruined in one night.

He rolls to his side and gathers himself in fetal position, holding himself until the last of his crying spell wears off and he’s staring emptily at the wall. He paid for five days, but he knows he can’t stay here. In this motel, much less in the room next to where that poor stranger was violated. Jaehyun knows he’ll go mad here. Especially now when that old trauma he thought he’d overcome was washing back over him in hungry waves. He was always trying to outrun the past, but it was dangerously close to catching him now.

So he showers, gathers himself until his reflection in the mirror is groomed again to look the part of the cunning and put together university student. Handsome like everyone expects him to be. He packs up his bags and leaves the motel room. It doesn’t matter that he can’t get a refund for the rest of the four days. He just needs to be out.

He’s locked the door behind him and is walking down the empty hallways when he sees him: that bastard from yesterday who had dragged the girl into the room next to his. He’s haggard as fuck, his hair mussed and his party clothes un-ironed. He must be checking out, the key to his room jingling in his hand. He seems to be damned proud of himself, he is whistling. And of all things, this is what makes Jaehyun lose it.  Jae moves without full comprehension of what he is doing. He drops his duffel bag, running forward and grabbing the man by the shoulder, spinning him around roughly.

“What the fuck!” The man says, facing Jaehyun without recognition.

_Of course you don’t recognize me. Your eye was on the prize last night. But I know what you did. I know what you fucking did._

The man is on the ground, holding his cheek; and Jaehyun only realizes that he’s punched him in the jaw when a sharp pain in his knuckles jerks him out of his reverie. But suddenly he can’t stop. He converges on him so furiously, the man can’t seem to do anything to defend himself except throw his arms up over his face, and his knees up to his chest. But Jaehyun breaks through, landing blows to his eyes and his nose. A solid crack tells him he’s broken his nose, and everything is bloodied; but he wants more. The man is begging him to stop, but Jaehyun just keeps imagining the drunk girl lying prone on the bed, too far  gone to give permission or to fight him off; and he wants to lose it because he knew what it meant to be that powerless. To be caught and unable to escape. But this— a tooth chips into his knuckle— is him setting it right. Is him making it all okay.

By the time Jaehyun’s energy exhausts itself, the man is lying unconscious on the ground; and Jae does not feel bad about it. His mind still racing furiously, he digs into his bag for his permanent marker. He knows it’s immature, but he feels vindictive today, and he’s willing to play mean.

Jaehyun goes to turn in his keys without a backwards glance. He leaves the unconscious man lying in the rickety hallway for someone else to find with the words **RAPIST PIG** scrawled on his forehead in permanent red ink.

~

                It was a beautiful Sunday, and Taeyong’s first day off in weeks. It was Yuta that had finally convinced him to take the day off.

                _Seriously, you’ll kill yourself working so damned hard, Taeyong._ Yuta had said. _Take a day off and spend the day with Mark. I’ll handle the bar. I know how to make most drinks anyways._

 _What if a customer orders something you don’t know how to do?_ Taeyong had asked, and Yuta had responded with a laugh: _I’ll demand they order something simpler._

So brazen and forward, just like Yuta always was. So Taeyong had agreed and was now out on a grocery store excursion with his little brother.

                Mark was in high spirits to be spending the day with his brother, the iced latte in his hand sweating in the mid-day heat.

                “How’s it feel to be amongst the day animals, hyung?” Mark asked, his dark eyes illuminated with sunlight. It indeed felt like a while since Taeyong had properly been out and about during the day. He was normally sleeping until four everyday when the sun had already arced to the mid-way point in the sky. He’d forgotten how much he loved the sun and the heat.

                “Good.” He chuckled, sipping his americano. “Very good.”

                The grocery bag was heavy with ripe fruit in his hand, and he was sweating, but the iced coffee kept him cool. He rubbed the condensation over his brow, relishing the cold. He devised a carefully planned route home that kept them on the pedestrian-only alleys, away from all the cars, and when Mark complained about how long it was taking, Taeyong chalked it up to sight seeing.

                “These alleys change everytime I pass them. I swear, the businesses spring up and die as quickly as weeds.” Taeyong says chidingly, and though Mark grumbles, he relents.

                Mark had always been an easy kid, even when he was very young. He had never been a crier, or a complainer. If anything, his most annoying trait was his unwillingness to confide. He never complained to Taeyong about being lonely, but his clearly overjoyed expression right now told Taeyong everything he needed to know: Mark was thrilled Taeyong was taking a day off work. He was excited to have his big brother’s company, and the thought alone sent a guilty pang through Taeyong. Sure, Mark had friends. Jeno and Jaemin in particular were very close and often spent most of the day together. But in the evenings they still returned to their families, and Mark returned to an empty home and ate dinner alone in front of the TV.

                “Hey, are you hungry? Want some walnut cakes?” Taeyong asked as they passed by a street vendor with steaming piles of soft walnut filled pastries, the scent of sweet bread wafting up from the cart.

                He ordered a bag, passing some money to the middle aged male vendor who accepted the money with a curt bow. Over his head, his red lettering was pulsing faintly: _Lung cancer._ Taeyong passed one of the bags to Mark, giving the cake vendor a pointed look.

                “You really shouldn’t smoke so much.” He said before walking away, leaving the vendor blinking at his back in utter confusion: he hadn’t even been so much as holding a cigarette.

                “Hyung, that’s such a weird thing to say. How would you know if he smokes or not?” Mark chuckled, used to his brother’s strangeness. Of course he couldn’t know of why Taeyong was almost clairvoyant about these things, much less could Taeyong tell him even if he wanted to.

                “I can just smell it on him.” Taeyong lied as they made their way towards an open park. They sat down on the bench, opening the steaming bags of cakes and eating them in comfortable silence. The pastries were delicious: warm and fluffy and honey-sweet. Between the cakes, coffee, sun, and his brother, Taeyong couldn’t even begin to imagine a more complete happiness. He wanted this moment to stretch out forever.

                “Hey.” He said, turning towards Mark, but keeping his eyes carefully trained to his eyes so as to avoid having to see the scarlet lettering that fortold his death. “Yuta has gotten really good at making cocktails. Almost as good as me.”

                “Yeah?” Mark says, not caring but willing to engage his brother in conversation.

                “Yeah. Some customers swear his whiskey sours are better than mine. So I was thinking, I can probably trust him to work the bar alone on slow days.”

                Mark’s face registered comprehension, and an uncertain smile was beginning to bloom on his face.

                “I was thinking working four days a week is still plenty to cover rent and your tuition. It’s not like we’re here buying luxury goods, so I might as well take it easy.” Taeyong continued, and Mark’s shy smile blossomed.

                “You’re going to actually take days off?” He asked as if in disbelief.

                Taeyong nodded. “Yeah. Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. Those three days. Of course, you don’t have to feel obligated to come home early on those days just because I’m off. You can spend as much time with Jeno and…”

                “I’ll come straight home.” Mark interjected, his face bright. “On those days. I’ll come straight home.”

                And the genuine, boyish joy in his voice was wonderful.

                The siblings finished their snack much more energetically before, talking and nothing and everything: Jeno’s new girlfriend, Jaemin’s strange ability to lose absolutely everything he owned, Mark’s school life. By the time they finally got up to return home, it was nearing 4pm, the sun at the midway point in the sky.

                The park was mostly empty, most people taking refuge from the muggy heat indoors. That’s why when he saw a tall figure swaddled in a sweater, walking erratically in their direction, Taeyong took notice. He watched the figure drawing closer, their hood was drawn up, and he seemed to be cradling one hand in the other. It was only when he drew close enough to read the red lettering that Taeyong realized who it was: Jaehyun. That customer.

                And he looked fucking distressed.

                His eyes were bloodshot and his face was swollen as if he’d spent the night crying. And he was trying to hide it with cloth bandages, but his hands were fucked up, bleeding through the fabric. Taeyong knew he should leave it alone. Afterall, he saw what Jaehyun’s red lettering says. It said he woul die because of him, and it’s probably better for both of them to just stay away from each other. But Taeyong was not the type who can see someone visibly distraught and do nothing about it.

                “Jaehyun?” Taeyong called, and he sees Jaehyun’s eyes snap into focus. He’d clearly been lost in his own thoughts and was about to pass them by. The young man stared at Taeyong unnervingly long, as if struggling to recognize who he was out of context. And then he realized it was that tweaky bartender, and discomfort filled his face.

                “Ah. I almost didn’t recognize you sober.” Jaehyun joked, but with none of the sass Taeyong had associated him with. He’s deadpan today, one hand clutched around the knuckles of the other as if in pain.

                For a while, a tense silence swirled in the air, but Mark was the one to break it.

                “Sir, are you alright?” He asked simply, his eyes flicking down to his bloodied knuckles, and then to his heavy duffel bag. “Do you need help?”

                Mark’s earnest concern softened Jaehyun’s expression and he offered a small smile. Jaehyun could tell that this young kid was the bartender’s younger brother, their dark features gave it away, as did the twinned gentle kindness in both of their expressions. It’s strange, but for a moment, Jaehyun felt his floodgates threatening to open, but he stifled it down.

                _You will not cry. You will not ask for help, not from these strangers._

“I’m okay.” He said. “But I urgently have to get somewhere.”

                A lie. Jaehyun had nowhere to go, quite literally. But he knew that even a second longer under these kind gazes he doesn’t deserve would wither him. He tried to whisk past, but a gentle hand on his elbow stayed him for just a moment. Taeyong was looking at him, his face clearly conflicted, as if he desperately wanted to tell him something, but didn't know if he should.

If it was any other regular customer clearly distressed and injured in front of him, Taeyong was the type to offer assistance, invite them over for a hot drink and talk out their problems, treat their injuries with antisceptic and gauze. But this was not just any customer. This was Jaehyun the enigma. Jaehyun, the one who wears his independence like a flag. Jaehyun who, though Taeyong does not know when or how, will die because of him. He wanted to help, but knew it would be a mistake. So instead he said nothing, taking his hand off of Jaehyun’s arm meekly, and tried not to notice the faint look of disappointment on his face. But it was gone as quickly as it came, and Jaehyun nodded stiffly before taking off without a backwards glance.

 

~~

 

                The subways at this stop pretty much cease running at night, so the station is empty. It’s muggy, and hot as the devil in this underground passage, but it’s empty and unpatrolled, and will have to do. Jaehyun lays out a bunch of newspapers in the corner, laying down over them and curling up around his duffel bag. The chambers where the trains come and go echo with distant clanging.

                _This is fine._ He tells himself. _I’m in control. I’m totally and completely fine._


	7. Red Thread of Fate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This chapter is a last moment of calm before shit hits the fan next chapter. Enjoy the lull :p Thank you as always to everyone who reads and leaves motivating comments <3

~~

Chapter 7

~~

                Taeyong is dreaming. It’s a peaceful dream this time. Sepia toned, tea stained and quiet. The indistinct scribbles of everything familiar to him: the faint outline of his bed, his desk, the mirror that reflects his shape but not his features.

                “Hansol?” He mutters, sitting up on his bed and rubbing his eyes. It’s not characteristic of him to use the reaper’s actual name, but today he wants to talk. “Hansol, where are you?”

                And suddenly he’s sitting right beside him as if he materialized out of thin air. The lithe reaper is adorned as usual in head to toe black. Despite his almost uncanny loveliness and impossibly dark eyes, Hansol looks very human. Taeyong could almost imagine him as some hipster in his bar sipping old fashions and reading. Briefly, Taeyong wonders about these messengers of death. Do they manifest in the form of mankind in order to be disarming to those they lead into the afterlife, or are they a projection of a life they briefly lived? At some point, long ago, had Hansol once been human as well? Taeyong supposed it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like the reaper ever divulged much information about himself to Taeyong anyways, and it would be pointless to ask. Besides, despite his curiosity, there were more pressing matters.

                “You haven’t come to me in dreams for a very long time.” Taeyong said, his voice more accusatory than he meant it.

                “You didn’t want me to.” Hansol said simply, black smoke curling around his feet.

                “So you reapers give a crap about what humans want or don’t want?” Taeyong asked.

                “Do you think us cruel?” Hansol asked, his face as calm as ever. Taeyong had never seen another expression on him. Just even, thoughtfulness.

                “You kill people.”

                “No. People live out their natural spans, and we escort them to what comes after.”

                “And what about the people who don’t get to live out their natural spans?” Taeyong asked, his temper rising despite himself. He couldn’t help but invision Yuta and Mark’s faces. Those beloved, beloved people who were destined to die cruelly and suddenly.

“They will live out their allotted spans. We all have destinies, Taeyong.”

“And some people are just destined to die violently, is that it? Everything they experience, all of their ambitions and dreams are culminating to an unexpected accident that curtails it all, is that it?”

Taeyong struggled with the weight of his own tongue, watching the sand in the hourglass paper-weight flowing up despite gravity.

After a long silence, Hansol finally answered.

“Who are you mourning?”

“I’m not mourning anyone!” Taeyong snapped, getting up to stare pointlessly out the window. There was nothing outside, just an endless stretch of off-white. He was lying. He was mourning. It felt like he’d done nothing but mourn for years for all the deaths that had not yet happened but undeniably would. Taeyong sucked in a shaky breath. This wasn’t why he’d wanted to speak to the reaper. He’d had actual questions. Ever since that Jaehyun boy walked into his life on that rain soaked evening, something had changed. And Taeyong did not like it.

“I met someone recently.” Taeyong began after a few tentative breaths. “And their red lettering said that I would be the cause of their death.”

Hansol said nothing, just nodding for him to continue. His lack of reaction was unsettling to say the least, but Taeyong supposed nothing was surprising to reapers. They’d seen it all.

“I’m not a murderer.” Taeyong continued. “I’m a lot of fucking things, Hansol. But that’s one thing I’m not. I won’t kill anyone. Not ever.”

“Perhaps you are not. But deaths can happen for a myriad of reasons. Who is to say you won’t unknowingly play a part?”

Taeyong hadn’t thought about that. There were so many ways to die without being murdered. Who was to say Taeyong wouldn’t accidentally lead Jaehyun to his death. He laughed, almost despite himself, overcome with relief.

“It’s so simple then. I’ll just avoid him then. Make sure to keep away from him. Then it won’t happen. He won’t have to die because of me…”

“It is impossible.” Hansol cut across curtly. “The red letters are undeniable. It is set in stone. You can’t avoid it.”

“Bullshit.” Taeyong said, swiveling to face Hansol. “Bullshit. I’ll get another job, make sure I never see him again. I can move to another city if I must.”

“A futile effort. Look.” The reaper said, taking Taeyong’s limp hand within his own, stroking at midair until something materialized in his grasp. A shimmering red thread was tied around Taeyong’s ring finger. The end of the red thread was nowhere in sight, it stretched on and on into the ether of his dreams.

“What—” He sputtered, he raised his hand to look at the red thread tied like a noose around his finger. He’d never seen it before, not in life or in dreams.

“It’s a red thread of fate.” Hansol said languidly as the thread shimmered cerise in his fingers. The moment the reaper let it go, it disappeared and Taeyong was left gaping in its wake. “You are destined to collide with this person. You can try to outrun it, but the thread of fate has been tied, and it is only getting shorter each day. I’ve seen many red threads, and not once have I seen any human able to disentangle themselves. The more you insult fate by trying to get away, the more aggressively she’ll throw you together.”

The world was beginning to flex and waver and him, slowly regaining clarity. The sand was almost completely risen to the top of the hourglass. Taeyong still had questions, but he was running out of time.

“Cut it.” Taeyong begged the reaper. “This red thread of fate or whatever the fuck it is, please cut it. I don’t want it. Please, please.”

But the reaper had his back turned on him, was walking away into the whiteness that swallowed him whole, and the next moment Taeyong was awake and sweating, the alarm clock blaring beside him.

 

~~

 

               

                The days passed by like a drunken tongue, slow, monotonous, heavy. The weather didn’t help. It beat down on him with sweltering fists so that merely sitting caused him to break out into a sweat.  Jaehyun continues to bounce back and forth between sleeping in the subways, or coughing up some money to sleep in the bath houses when the humidity was unbearable. On the days when the summer rain ceased, he slept by the Han River using a bench as his bed and his duffel bag as his pillow. After the incident, he stays away from love motels. He continues dodging Ten’s phone calls, and sits far away from him in class.

                Jaehyun knew he was hurting his best friend by being so cold. But there was something so unbearable about Ten’s naïve kindness, and how he gently tried to push Jaehyun back into his parent’s home.

                _They’re your parents, Jae._ Ten would say chidingly over the phone, the static punctuating his voice as if it were pulled through a sieve. _You can’t not talk to them forever._

But Ten didn’t know anything about what had transpired between he and his family. He only knew what the Jung’s outwardly tried to project: the staunchly upper-middle class family, the church-going, philanthropic members of society with their perfect home and manicured lawn and brilliant University-bound son. But that was all just a mask hiding a very fractured face. But how would Ten know that, if Jaehyun never confided?

                _And monsoon season is coming soon. You’re going to need shelter. Permanent shelter._

But Jaehyun would rather get pelted by hot, torrential rain than return back to the sterile halls of the Jung household. Even now, just thinking of his childhood bedroom made quiver: the plain white walls. Unlike other children, he’d not been allowed to decorate his room except a wooden crucifix over the door. The whiteness of it all had seemed to get more claustrophobic as he got older. His room had been white, and similarly he had been expected to be just as pure. Immaculate, perfect Jaehyun. Filial son, straight A student, church going, law abiding, heart as white and clean as snow; spotless, spotless. Mother-fucking-spotless. All lies. All bullshit, because he wasn’t clean. He was dirty, and had been since middle school (all those nights, his sweat-slicked back stuck on the unhusked mattress, hands moving unbidden up his thigh, perfume redolent with roses. Roses, he fucking hates roses.)

                Jaehyun turned off the sink, his hair sopping wet from having haphazardly washed it under the running faucet. His hand had kicked up into a slight tremor, and he held himself until it began to subside. For a while he just looked loathingly at his reflection in the cracked and speckled mirror. He was in a run-down train station bathroom. Disgustingly dilapidated as it was, Jaehyun favored it because of the privacy it allotted. Most people kept to the newer infrastructure, so the bathrooms that were relics of an older time got almost no foot traffic. Just Jaehyun and the occasional fellow bum trying to have a bootleg shower in the sink.

 _What the fuck are you shaking for, you damned chihuahua?_ He berated himself, taking slow, bracing breaths. A drink. He needed a drink. But first, he needed to look presentable.

Jaehyun brought out a razor from his bag, using it to shave the light stubble from his cheek. The thought of what his mother would think if she could see him now almost made Jaehyun want to burst into an insane fit of laughter. Her perfect, beloved son shaving in a run-down public bathroom with dicks scrawled over all of the urinals, with graffiti on the walls of people scribbling their names, proclaiming that they were here, that they existed in this derelict little bathroom off the beaten path. A desperate bid to be remembered and matter.

                _But you don’t matter._ Jaehyun thinks to himself. _Nothing does._

~~

                Jaehyun was sitting in his regular stool at the bar, but today he had company. A petite, lovely Thai boy with a beautiful smile (Red lettering: _Old Age)_. Taeyong polished the wine glasses as he watched the two men engage in hushed conversation over their drinks. Taeyong didn’t mean to listen in, but he caught bits and pieces of their conversation that seemed to escalate in intensity each passing moment.

                “She’s been calling me asking for updates everyday. No Jaehyun, I haven’t told her anything, but I’m tired of lying for you..”

                And

                “How can I help you if you keep locking me out like this? This is the first time we’ve seen each other in weeks, why are you avoiding me? We’re supposed to be friends? Best friends?”

                And

                “I don’t know what happened, but you’re breaking your mother’s heart. You should call her. At least give it a chance.”

                It wasn’t long until the smaller man was pushing himself up from the barstool, his drink unfinished, and storming out of the bar in a flurry of emotion. Jaehyun didn’t even try to chase after him. He just pulled his drink closer, as if it were a life line, and rested his head against the sticky surface of the bartop.

                “Everything alright my friend?” Taeyong asked, pouring some soju into his shot glass, which Jaehyun took down immediately, cringing at the aftertaste.

                “Golden. Never been better.” Jaehyun said flatly, resting his head on the bar again.  

                Taeyong shrugged, going back to methodically rubbing the dried condensation from the cabernet glasses. Ever since that strange dream in which Hansol had revealed the red thread that connected their lives, Jaehyun had become increasingly harder to avoid. He frequented Taeyong’s work nearly every night, and almost as if fate was mocking his effort to stay away from him, they ran into one another constantly even outside of the bar. Taeyong swore he saw the boy everywhere: on the streets, outside the library stoop, in the subway getting on the same train. Not to mention that very odd time when Taeyong and Mark ran into Jaehyun when he was all frazzled and bloody; an incident neither had brought up in conversation, almost as if by unspoken agreement. Nowadays, Taeyong felt as if he’d sprouted a second shadow. It was maddening.

                _The more you insult fate by trying to get away, the more aggressively she’ll throw you together,_ The reaper had said in that wretched dream. And Taeyong was beginning to realize that it was already happening. Jaehyun and his red lettering was everywhere. Everywhere, and he couldn’t seem to get away.

                “He looked really upset didn’t he?” Jaehyun mumbled all of a sudden, bringing Taeyong out of his reverie. Jaehyun was pouring himself another shot of soju, his normally very composed face suddenly unhusked and brilliantly vulnerable.

                “Pardon?”

                “My friend. I really upset him.” Jaehyun repeated, his voice overladen with guilt. He was looking at the drink his friend had stormed out before finishing, dark circles half mooned under his eyes.

                A small ping indicated that a new drink order had been placed for a back table, and the bar printer began spitting out the cocktail orders. Excellent. Taeyong needed something to do with his hands.

                “He did look hurt, but I trust that wasn’t your intention.” Taeyong said, pouring some sugar, mint, and lime into a bowl. He muddled the mixture until the pulp had broken down and the oil from the lime peel was fragrant before pouring in some white rum and shaking vigorously.

                “I would never want to hurt Ten.” Jaehyun replied, his words markedly slurred. He was tipsy. Taeyong would have to moderate how much he drank now. “He’s my oldest friend. But sometimes he can get so pushy…”

                Taeyong garnished the mojitos with a small spritz of soda water and a mint leaf before ringing the bar bell so Johnny would know to come get it.

                “Something about speaking to your mother?” Taeyong asked, giving Jaehyun an apologetic smile when he looked at him wide eyed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but this bar is only so big.”

                For a moment, Taeyong figured Jaehyun would not respond, but very quietly, he did.

                “It’s not as if I don’t want to. It’s not like I don’t miss her, of course I do. But it’s not so simple.”

                Taeyong nodded for him to go on. It was practically in any bartender’s job description to act as an open ear and confidant to their regulars. His time working as a bartender had trained him on when to speak and when to listen, and now was the time to listen.

                “It’s easy for Ten to just urge me to go home. Of course it is, because Ten’s family is so great. They support him, they love him as he is. But my mum, she loves the son I briefly was. But I’m not that anymore, and she won’t have me as I am now. Not her, much less my father.” Jaehyun was rambling drunkenly. Without context, Taeyong wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but he could hear the longing ripe in his voice. There was something so very diminutive about his voice that reminded Taeyong of a child. Or more specifically, it reminded him of Mark’s voice so many years ago when he began to ask why their mother was no longer coming home.

                “You miss her.” Taeyong said matter of factly.

                Jaehyun just nodded.

                “And why can’t you see her? It sounded like your friend was mentioning her reaching out to you.”

                “Because..” Jaehyun said, so quietly Taeyong had to lean over the bar to hear. “I can’t handle being rejected by her a second time.”

                There it was again. That horribly raw vulnerability that was so rare in Jaehyun that it caught Taeyong off guard each time he saw it. He poured some water into a glass and reached over, grabbing Jaehyun’s hands and leading them until they wrapped around the base of the cup. Jaehyun was too drunk, and he needed to drink some water or he would feel ill in the morning. Taeyong wondered briefly about if Jaehyun lived nearby enough to get home alone safely, if his home was well stocked with the much needed restorative food and pain-killers for the mornings after his drinking binges. But he quickly pushed the thought out of his mind.

                _It shouldn’t matter to me._

                “Who is to say you would be rejected?” Taeyong asked quietly as Jaehyun gulped down the water. “If she’s been trying to reach out, she obviously misses you.”

                For a terrible moment, Taeyong fears Jaehyun is about to cry. Something is clearly trying to bubble to his surface, but of course, he wrestles it down. Taeyong watches in amazement as Jaehyun’s face goes from the verge of ruin, to stoney in the matter of minutes. Taeyong would do anything for that amount of emotional control. But still, he’s seen it. He’s seen right through to that core of unspeakable hurt, and it was impossible to take it back. As if worried he’s said too much, Jaehyun drains the rest of the soju and stands up, leaving some bills on the bartop.

                “I should get home.” He slurs.

                “Where is home? Do you need me to call you a cab?” Taeyong asks, but Jaehyun is already halfway out the door. The moment he is out of his sight, Taeyong feels the strangest lurching in his system, as if gravity itself is trying to keep them in close proximity.

“Jesus, that kid is troubled.” Yuta says hours later while they’re cleaning up the bar in preparation to close.

“How so?” Taeyong asks as he wipes down the nozzles of the beer taps and plugging them to keep fruit flies from being drawn to any residual sugars.

“Don’t act dumb, Taeyong, you know exactly what I mean. He plays the part of the immaculate rich kid very well, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. Poor kid seems to be a trip and a fall away from emotional breakdown at all times.”

“We work at a bar, man. We see all types of broken people, and half of them are addicts. You never seem to think twice about any regulars. So why all of a sudden?”

Yuta hangs up some glasses in the overhead tray, his normally impish face somehow unhusked and open. Taeyong so often forgets about this side of Yuta, the soft hearted one that, despite all of his prickly mannerisms and words, could be empathetic to a fault.

“I care because he’s young, I think.” Yuta says, turning off the bar lights so the room is flooded in darkness. Only the red glow from alarm clock illuminates them in hellish light. In the dark, Yuta’s red lettering seems to throb all the  more harder, burning into the back of Taeyong’s corneas. Brighter than ever before, as if to be insistent. “He’s too young to be drinking this much, and this often. He’s going to kill himself if this goes on.”

_No, he won’t. He won’t because the cause of his death is not himself, it’s—_

As they leave the bar and lock the door behind them Taeyong can’t stop thinking about the red that dictates all of their lives. Yuta’s red lettering that only seems to glow brighter each day, Jaehyun and his bloodshot eyes, the red thread that binds them both. The red threads of all their lives, weaving, tangling, drawing everyone mercilessly towards their deaths like some dark horse.  

 

~

                Jaehyun is on a park bench overlooking the river. To his left are a couple oblivious to anything but each other’s lips. Above him, is the vast sky and all its constellations. He’s drunk, but desperately trying to snap out of it, the hot tea steaming in the paper cup he holds in his hands.

                A family is passing by him, and they give him a strange look when they see his large duffel bag and stack of newspapers he is intending to use to cover himself. The father tries to usher his wife past quickly, and Jaehyun watches with bloodshot eyes as the woman holds the sleeping child to her breast tighter and they whisk by.

                Abruptly, Jaehyun is hit by a wild hunger for the past. He remembers being carried like that in his mother’s arms. He remembers a time when he’d associated her warm, vanilla perfume with safety and love and being loved. He remembers winters spent with her in front of a blazing fireplace, drinking milky nut tea down to the honey-thick dregs that he dug out to eat with his fingers. He remembers her laughter, and her praise when he’d bring home good grades, and the warmth of her embrace; and suddenly Jaehyun realizes that he wants it all back. The happiness and love his childhood had very briefly known, he wants it again. And when did this phone get in his hands? He doesn’t know, but he does know that he still has the number memorized by heart and oh god, it’s ringing.

                It takes all of two rings for her to pick up, but she doesn’t say hello. Instead he just hears a steady, silent sobbing on the other end of the phone and Jaehyun realizes this is the first of her voice he has heard in months.

                “Mom.” His own voice is barely a whisper, he can barely speak. He tries to choke down the memories of the last time he saw her, he doesn’t need to be weighed down by that now. “Mom.”

                “Jaehyun-ie?” She finally chokes out, and the sound of his name in her voice pulls him under.

                “Mother, I—” His voice is tear heavy, though he hadn’t been meaning to cry. “Do you want to see me? Mom, can I come home?”

                Her answer is yes. Jaehyun holds the phone to his ear long after they’ve hung up. The sky above him goldens, adorns itself with migrating birds, yields slowly and effortfully to morning


	8. The Mother

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Before you read this chapter, I just wanted to make sure I don't offend anyone who is Christian. I know I may have painted it a little harshly here, but be aware that I grew up in a church as well, and I am fully aware that not all religious people are like they appear in this chapter. xoxo

~~

Chapter 8

~~

 

                The heavy gates clanged shut behind him, and very suddenly it all became real. Jaehyun honestly thought he’d never come back to this place. He almost failed to recognize it for how much the front lawn had changed. It had been late winter when Jaehyun had packed his duffel bags and left home, his mother on her knees and sobbing in their driveway. Now it was nearing summer, and what was once barren was awash in colors. The flowers had all bloomed: the snapdragon and orchids piercing their colors high above the rot they stemmed from, the honeysuckle heavy with bees drawn to their stamens, the calyxes of every petalled thing opened to the sun. Such fertile beauty, it was almost as if the garden had bloomed so fervently to welcome him home.

                “I’m back.” Jaehyun whispered, his heart hammering unpleasantly in his chest. He’d been drunk last night, and had hardly thought through the myriad of ways this reunion could go. But his mother had sounded moved to tears to hear his voice last night, and Jaehyun was full of silly, silly hope.

                When he’d left home, he hadn’t packed his keys, believing stubbornly that he would never return. His hands tremoring despite himself, he rang the doorbell and heard the loud three tones clanging inside their home. No one came to the door, there was just the sound of the trees swaying and his own wretched heartbeat. He was just about convinced no one would come when he heard the lock being pushed aside and the varnished Cherrywood door was opening. He barely had time to whimper out of vague sound like “Moth—” before he was enveloped in a slight pair of arms and vanilla perfume.

                “Jaehyun, oh thank God. Thank the Lord!”

                Jaehyun was bent double to accommodate how much taller he was than her, and his mother’s voice was muffled in his hair. At the sound of her familiar voice, his paralysis dispelled and he was holding her just as desperately. Yes, this was the voice of his childhood. This was the voice he heard rising high in the church choir, this was the voice that scolded him gently when he broke his toys, that praised him for his grades and perfect manners, the voice that sang him back to sleep when he used to wake up with nightmares. How could he have ever thought to leave the owner of this voice?

                “Mom, I’m back.” He said, the vulnerability in his own voice shocked him. But there it was. She half lead, half pulled him into the home, shutting the door behind him. She had dressed up for his return: She had clearly taken an iron to her hair for how shiny and curly it was. She was wearing her favorite rose shade of lipstick, and her best jewelry; a rose-gold necklace with a brilliant opal pendant that housed all the shades of sunrise. It had been an anniversary present to her from his father so many years ago.

                “Come, sit. I’ve made your favorite tea.”

                She sat him down at the dining table, kissing him once fondly over the head before running to the kitchen. Jaehyun heard the click of the stove as she warmed the tea, and her clattering around for honey or sugar.

                Jaehyun took in his surroundings slowly, tentatively. For how incredibly fancy their home looked from the outside, the interior had always been surprisingly bland. There were very little decorations to speak of, no clutter, no mess. The only embellishments in the dining room were a few ornamental plates and vases, and a set of photographs of the family over the years lining the walls. It was all so familiar and unfamiliar all at once. His mother’s favorite celadon plate was still there on the shelf, displaying its brilliant green hue, but the space beside it that had once housed a beautiful antique Ming vase was empty (because his father had thrown it at his head on that last night. A thousand dollars-worth of antique vase reduced to an explosion of varnished ceramic on the wall behind him, the shards cutting his cheek, the soles of his feet. His mother shouting for it all to stop.)

                His mother bustling back into the kitchen drew him away from his thoughts. She set a platter down between them with two steaming mugs of red tea and a serving dish of honey.

                “Date tea was always your favorite dear. Drink up.”

                Jaehyun picked up his mug, taking in the sweet scent of honey and dried dates, whole coiled lengths of cinnamon, the sharp notes of ginger and clove. His mother does the same, and they drank in silence together. This was so incredibly nostalgic. How many days had Jaehyun and his mother done just this after he got off from school, drinking tea and talking until it neared evening and they headed to the kitchen together to cook dinner in time for father’s return?

                “Where have you been living?” his mother asked, breaking the reverie, her eyes were serious. How could Jaehyun tell her about the way he had been scraping by? He had to lie.

                “I’ve been with my friend. He has an extra guestroom.” He said, trying to ignore the glint of suspicion in his mother’s eyes.

                “Who? It can’t be your friend Ten, I’ve been in contact with him and he claims he hardly sees you nowadays apart from class.”

                Jaehyun churns his head fervently for other names and draws up a blank. He’d never been a social butterfly, preferring very much to keep to his family and Ten as his main and only social circle. There was no one else, but he had to give a name.

                “Taeyong.” He blurted out without thinking, surprising himself. “I’ve been staying with a friend named Lee Taeyong. Friend from University. Good guy.”

                _Taeyong? Really? That bartender?_ He thought to himself incredulously. _Well I guess it isn’t a complete lie. I am at his bar almost every night of the week._

“Taeyong?” His mother repeated slowly. “A boy?”

                Jaehyun nodded, feeling suddenly very uncomfortable in his very familiar surroundings.

                “And have you been going to church dear?” She asked, her voice suddenly slightly sterner. It didn’t surprise Jaehyun that she would ask this question so quickly. After all, their family had always been extremely religious. He had grown up in church, had dedicated all of his Sundays to worship with scripture spread across his knees in the pews. And how could he have not, given his father was a pastor? His mother the lead singer in the church choir?

                He cleared his throat.

                “No mother, I have not been.”

                If she was disappointed, she didn’t really vocalize it. They bypassed the conversation. She drank her tea, and they talked for a while about frivolous things. Has he been keeping up his grades? How is Ten doing? What had she been up to for these past few months without him? It wasn’t for a little while before Jaehyun noticed his mother looked nervous. She was tugging at her opal necklace again and again, her eyes continuously glancing at the grandfather clock in the corner.

                “Mother, are you alright?” Jaehyun asked.

                She looked at him distractedly, before straightening up, trying to slip on that mask of composure. But Jaehyun had already seen it slip.

                “Where is father?” He asked. They had last seen each other under terrible, violent, angry circumstances (Jaehyun still had a little scar on his cheek from where the vase had shattered near his head). But that didn’t mean he didn’t still carry fond childhood memories of his father with him. It didn’t mean he didn’t want to be able to talk it out man to man, heart to heart. Jaehyun trusted the passage of time, and the way emotional wounds sutured themselves. He had faith they could fix this.

                “Your father is at a convention right now.” His mother said slowly, and Jaehyun could practically feel her struggling with words. This wasn’t like her at all. She was a woman of great wit, exceptionally articulate. But suddenly it seemed like she had been robbed of her speech. And then suddenly she reached towards him on the table, clasping his hands in her tiny, cold ones. She stroked the skin of his knuckles lovingly, like she used to do when he was a child.

                “Your father does not know you are here.” She said quietly, and Jaehyun feels his heart drop. From close up, he can also see how much just a few months of anguish had aged his mother, dark circles rimming the bottom of her eyes and he feels terrible for her. He feels terrible for her, and he feels terrible for his fucking self.

                “You didn’t tell him…”

                She shakes her head no.

                “Your father is a stubborn man, and he always means exactly what he says. That night, when he claimed you were no longer his son…” She trails off because Jaehyun remembers of course he does.

                It was almost cliché how hard it had been raining that night. The roof was pelted with it, the windows wobbling from the force of the wind and the thunder. Jaehyun remembered the hushed conversation at the dinner table, no one had even touched their food. His mother had been holding the cutlery just for the motion of it, but had made no move to eat because Jaehyun and his father’s conversation had just continued to escalate and escalate. Jaehyun had been desperate for his father’s approval. He’d been desperate for his father to understand him, to still love him and approve of him, and proudly speak of him.

                But instead his father had stood up, that desperate temper ignited, and he’d swept his arms across the dinner table, sending all of the plates careening off. Jaehyun distinctly remembered his mother had made his father’s favorite whole fish stew that night, and it had gone flying onto the floor, the dish it was laid in shattering leaving bits of fish spine and braised radish and bright red soup everywhere. The floor was suddenly covered in shattered dishware that cut into their feet, and his mother had begun to uncharacteristically shout.

                _No son of mine—_ His father had been shouting, barely coherent for all his anger. _No fucking son of mine would—_

He had grabbed a vase off the cabinet and chucked it at Jaehyun’s head, and quickly grabbed another, but Jaehyun didn’t wait around. He’d taken off running for his room, his own heart a mess of anger and terror  and wretched, wretched betrayal. The bareness of the white walls had seemed to close in on him then as he packed his duffel bag with only essentials, leaving the rest behind. The crucifixes and bibles seemed to mock him. By the time he had packed his bags and was leaving out the door, down the driveway, his father had finished his tantrum and was just watching him leave, his expression as cold as the weather outside.

                _Don’t you ever come back here. I’m not your father anymore._

And he’d turned his back, went back into their home. This was the last Jaehyun had seen of his father.

                Jaehyun knew exactly what his mother was trying to say. That his father had meant it wholeheartedly when he said he’d disowned him, that he was no longer part of this family. That all of their years in the same home, that all the childhood fishing trips and days in front of the roaring fire, that all of their holidays and vacations to lush island countries, all of the lullabies and tears and warm moments of quiet; his father had drawn a curtain on it all. And he did not regret it. He did not ache for it in the same way Jaehyun secretly had for months, despite how he denied it to himself.

                He didn’t want to admit that he’d been hoping for more. The joy in his mother’s voice on the phone had made him foolishly dream that perhaps his father missed him too. That they had talked it through and were willing to try again as a family.

                How could he have been so fucking stupid? Jaehyun wildly swallowed around his tears, determined not to break down. Suddenly everything around him felt uncanny, unfamiliar. He looked at the family photographs adorning the walls and suddenly realized with a start that he was in none of them. His childhood photo, the photo of his graduation, the photos of he and his family on vacation in Greece all suntanned and smiling, suddenly they were all gone. It was only his parents smiling alone in the photos, and he was cleaved from them as if his existence were a dream they’d woken from and could not remember.

                His mother’s hand was still wrapped around his own, but suddenly it felt like poison, like betrayal. He tried to untangle himself, but she held on tighter; her eyes quivering with unshed tears.

                “Let go.” He said said, his voice barely above a whisper.

                “Baby, I still believe we can recover from this.” She said, desperate. Her voice a weird collision between love and sadness and disappointment and…disgust? “I still believe we can be a family again. Your father, he wanted to burn all of your stuff. But I snuck it out and put it in storage. I saved it all. Even the photos of you because I still believe… I still…”

                “Still believe what mom?” Jaehyun asked, and she flinched a little at the obvious hurt in his voice. “He fucking disowned me. If he still hasn’t changed his mind months later, what could I possibly do now?”

                His mother’s hand clamped down on his harder, her eyes wild with a yearning to keep her son close. Jaehyun had never noticed how broken his mother was, how dearly she relied on him, but he saw it now and it hurt and repulsed him.

                “You could repent, baby.” She said, her voice strangely cooing until he couldn’t tell if she was trying to comfort him or herself.  

                Jaehyun knew where this conversation was going, and he couldn’t handle it. He had to leave, but she was holding on like a vice.

                “Mom stop.”

                “If you repent, your father might still forgive you. And we could be a family again..”

                “Mom, please—”

                “Don’t you want that? You could move back home, we can all sit here on this table and laugh and talk like we used to…”

                Jaehyun feels himself go weak, limp. A ragdoll tossed around in the high-winds of what his parents expected him to be.

                “I’ve seen it happen before, and I believe you can be healed. Have you heard of conversion therapy?”

                A hysterical laugh rips itself from Jaehyun’s throat. He laughs because he has to do something, but refuses to cry.

                “Conversion therapy. You want me to pray away the gay. Are you fucking kidding me mother, what is this, the 1950’s?”

                His mother is shaking her head, rambling on and on about how it could work. How somebody in her church group sent her lesbian daughter to one of the conversion therapy camps and now she was magically straight and engaged to a nice man. So much garbage. So much utter and complete drivel. Jaehyun knew all about what happened at these conversion therapy programs. It was all negative reinforcement. Showing people gay porn while subjecting them to hot irons on their skin, or electric shocks until the mere sight of a male body caused terror and repulsion. Berating them about how they were destined for hell until fear overrode their desire for authentic love. It was torture masquerading around with a new name. And his mother wanted to subject him to that?

                Jaehyun threw her hands off his own and stood up, his entire body shaking with rage.

                “I could expect such garbage talk from Father. But from you? Mom, I trusted you. I thought you cared about me?”

                “I do care!” His mother half whimpered, half shrieked. Her immaculate hair fraying at the ends, the perfect curls suddenly unkempt. “I more than care. I love you baby. I’m just trying to help you”

                “Bullshit.” Jaehyun said. “You’re lying to me again. And you know what fucking sucks? I actually love you, and even dad. I still think about you, care about you. Accept you just the way you are. But you love me with stipulations. With limitations. I don’t need that kind of love.”

                And he turned to leave out of the dining room, into the foyer, out the door. His mother following close behind, sobbing about something, begging him not to leave or give up, that he can still be a man of God. But he was not listening because this scene is all so familiar. All that’s missing was his father staring coldly at his leaving frame as if he no longer cared if he lived or died. And just like that night months before, his mother followed hysterical, but only so far as the gate as if tethered to the make-believe of her perfect, fake life.

~

                Jaehyun doesn’t let himself breakdown until he’s well out of his childhood neighborhood, and then abruptly he does in some random alley near a local highschool. But this breakdown comes with no tears, it comes with dissociation, almost as if he no longer owns the body he inhabits. He wanders around like a ghost mourning their old life, not really seeing or noticing anything. But people notice him. People always notice Jaehyun, even as he stares off into space and floats by like an apparition. Girls whisper and make futile eyes at him. The elders assume he is drunk or high or crazy and walk around him. But there is one set of eyes that watches him the most closely, first trying to pinpoint why exactly Jaehyun looks so fucking familiar, and why the face fills him with so much shame and rage.

                And then it clicks.

                The man tosses aside the can of beer he’d been drinking in the convenience store  window, every bit of him suddenly aching for blood. The man recognizes Jaehyun because he had been the one he had pummeled inside that love motel. He was the one Jaehyun had beaten, caved in his nose, left him for unconscious for the staff to find later. He was the man whose face Jaehyun had scrawled “RAPIST PIG” in red ink that wouldn’t come out for days no matter how hard he scrubbed. He’d been humiliated and ostracized and shamed beyond all reason by Jaehyun. And now, in this darkening, empty alley and Jaehyun oblivious to anything around him, the man sees a perfect chance to get him back.

                He reaches into his pocket, wraps his fingers around his little black switchblade knife, and follows.


	9. Collision Course

~~

Chapter 9

~~

                Jaehyun had no destination. He was merely walking, only vaguely aware of the fact that the sun was almost down and his feet were leading him down winding alleys of corner stores, lamp posts and little else. Every once and awhile, he drifted past an errant highschool student getting out from their late classes from the nearby school; but they seemed to weave around him as if he were a threat.

                Silly kids. He wasn’t substantial enough to be dangerous. He was nothing. Less than smoke.

                He watched the teenagers walking huddled together, giggling, sharing ice cream cones and junk food amongst themselves; and Jaehyun vaguely remembers once having been that carefree. Years and years ago, running down the streets of Seoul with Ten, content and happy when he hadn’t yet been faced with the reality of himself and his parents had still loved him.

                He’d left his duffel bag locked in the employee closet of his library internship, which meant he had no access to it now. All he had on him were his beat up cell phone and a few crinkled won’s in his pocket. Not enough for entrance to the bathhouses for the night. Hell, it wasn’t even enough for a decent drink, though he ached for it with the intensity of a great thirst in a drought. If he were just a little more shameless, he may have walked into Taeyong’s bar penniless and begged for some whiskey; but he had already hit rock bottom tonight and he refused to see if he could sink any lower.

                A bench. Any park bench would do, and if that didn’t pan out, a random place on the floor would do just as well. He didn’t care. What did it matter? But for now he wanted to walk until his body exhausted itself. Until the soles of his feet eroded into sand and he was too tired to even recall his mother’s name.

                Jaehyun slowly shook his head, trying desperately to dispel the memory of this evening. He’d been such a damned fool for thinking his family would have changed their mind, magically decided to accept him. Prejudice was a sticky beast, and Jaehyun had been too idealistic, too naïve when he’d dared to imagine that a lifetime’s worth of homophobia could be overturned in months.

                When the rumors had reached them about Jaehyun’s illicit relationship with a boy from his church group, his father had nearly broken his wrists for how tightly he’d gripped them. _You are never to see him again,_ he’d ordered, his knuckles reddening from a ferocious backhand that had sent Jaehyun crashing into the china cabinet.

  _Never again, you hear me?_

                It would never change. His father had beaten him, disowned him; sure. But his mother had wanted him in conversion therapy, electrotherapy… medieval solutions for something he had no control over. Two equally damaging sides to the same coin. It would never change, his parents would never understand him… simply because they didn’t want to.  He had no family now. The sooner he came to terms with that the better.

                He turned another corner, his feet carrying him aimlessly, his body somehow separate from his mind. Jaehyun was so distracted in the past, in his current betrayal and sadness, that he didn’t hear the body sneaking up on him in the empty alleyways. He didn’t notice until the crook of an elbow locked itself across his throat and he was pulled backwards violently, sputtering.

“Son of a bitch” a voice grunted in his ear. “You fucking son of a bitch.”

Unfamiliar. The voice rang no bells, but Jaehyun could recognize hate when he heard it. His trachea constricted, stars scattered across his vision as his knees hit the floor. He was vaguely aware that he’d been brought down, that someone had grabbed a fistful of his hair and was pulling his head back. The light of a nearby streetlamp glinted off of something sleek just below his line of vision. A knife. A small one, but a knife all the same.

                Not good, his mind bleated dully at him. His throat exposed to air, his adams apple bobbing. Too vulnerable.

                Without full comprehension, he blindly shot his hand out above his head to where he knew his assailants face would be, and by a wild stroke of luck, his index finger hit something gelatinous and wet. An eye. There was blood on Jaehyun’s fingers, and the air immediately smelled of damp iron. The person holding him shrieked as his vision was immediately compromised. A telltale clattering of metal behind him told Jaehyun that his assailant had dropped his knife in pain. With a quick kick, Jaehyun scattered the knife far away from them. He heard it go skidding across the concrete until it landed against the wall with a metallic thump several feet away from him

                He sputtered, dragging in air in desperate lung-fulls. Jaehyun wasn’t entirely sure what was happening or why, but he knew he had succeeded in disarming his attacker. But why was this happening? Money? Was he being robbed? The thought alone made a wilder part of Jaehyun want to laugh out loud. How disappointed his attacker would be if he killed him only to find out that he barely had enough money to buy one meal on him.  Jaehyun locked eyes with his assailant, he needed to know who was doing this to him; he wanted to see that malice.

                The man was so hysterically angry, he was practically frothing at the mouth. This wasn’t just any random act of violence, this was pointed, personal. There was personal ill will here, but Jaehyun didn’t recognize the man. He’d long since forgotten his face. Jaehyun wasn’t sure what sort of madness overtook him in that moment, but he felt a wild smugness made his face break into a condescending smile.

                “Where’s your knife buddy?” Jaehyun croaked, his windpipe still very much throbbing from having been held in a chokehold, but he still wanted to taunt. He wanted to hurt this strangers pride. “Oops, did I disarm you?”

                The man looked down at Jaehyun’s infuriatingly handsome face. He was on the ground, vulnerably held on his back, his cheek smudged with blood from where it was scraped along the concrete. He was vulnerable, completely at his mercy, and yet still laughing as if he’d won out in this situation. Insufferable prick. And worst of all, there was no recognition in the boy’s eyes. None at all. The assailant had done nothing but dream about his face for the past few weeks since that night at the love motel. Every night he’d dreamt of running into him in some empty alley and making him beg for his life, or pummeling him until that handsome face was no longer recognizable as a face. This boy had written the words _RAPIST_ on his forehead in permanent red marker and left him unconscious for the staff to find. He would never forget those glares of condemnation, or the humiliation of walking home with those words stamped across his face like a scarlet letter. Hell, he’d become a pariah in his neighborhood. Rumor of what had happened spread fast and everyone avoided him, tried to get his name on the sex offenders registry. He’d been fired from his company job. And all for what? This smug college kid lying on his back about to be beaten to a pulp but still laughing at him as if he’s nothing?

                Of all things, it was the lack of recognition in Jaehyun’s eyes that sets his attacker off. If he had remembered him, if his eyes had registered fear or panic or remorse, he’d feel vindicated. But there was none of that, only a fearlessness that reminded him of just how impotent he was.

                Disarmed, the man had no weapons, but that wouldn’t stop him from giving Jaehyun what he deserved. He converged on the boy with his fists, one hand grabbing his shirt collar while his other hand dealt blows to his cheek, his jaw. Jaehyun felt a deep cut open up on his lip, and he bit down on his tongue hard to keep from crying out. The iron taste of blood bloomed in his mouth, but he was as quiet as a whisper. He wouldn’t give this stranger the satisfaction of hearing him whimper.

                Besides. This wasn’t so bad. Compared to the grievous emotional injury his mother had dealt him earlier today, this physical beating was nothing. He curled up on himself in fetal position to protect his viscera, and held his arms before his face and just let it happen. The man breathing hard and fast above him as he stood up to kick his sides viciously with the hard soles of his boots. Jaehyun made further moves to defend himself. The fight had left him completely. He’d been fighting for so many months now just to get by, and he couldn’t do it anymore.

                “…Fucking ruined my life you little cunt. I’m going to…” Jaehyun felt a rib splinter, his vision starting to go into a tail spin of white. “… fucking kill you, son of a bitch”

                He was starting to lose consciousness. He was losing it all.

                And it was in the last throes of his mind desperately trying to stay conscious that his assailant’s voice started to coalesce with his father’s. That memory of so many months ago, his father throwing him across the china cabinet, his face wine-red with self-righteous fury. The crucifix hanging like judgement on the wall over his head.

                _No son of mine…_

“Don’t fucking pass out, I’m not done with you yet—”

                Jaehyun opened his eyes and everything was red. There was blood in his eyes, obscuring his vision and he was so confused, disoriented. He wasn’t sure where he was, or whose hands were tightening over his throat; a strangers or his fathers. In his head he heard every vase in the china cabinet shattering, his mother’s shrill shrieking.

                “Stay awake, I said stay aw—”

                _… No fucking son of mine will be a goddamned—_

The streetlamp’s distant flickering pulled into a vortex, all the breath in his lungs leaving him at once. He can’t keep his eyes open, can’t stay awake. To pass out now is probably a death sentence…

                _Fag._

Jaehyun wants to fall unconscious, so he falls.

 

~

                Mark was peaceful by nature. While the other kids in his highschool wrestled and got into scuffles to prove who was strongest, toughest, the boss; Mark was content to sit by and idly watch. When he and his brother went on a fishing trip, his brother would be the one who reeled in his catches, stunned the fish with a blow to the head, and threw them into the icebox to cook up for dinner while Mark unlatched the hook from their mouths and tossed them back into the water; content to let them live. Mark was gentleness incarnate, he had no vicious bone in his body.

                Which was why Jeno was so shocked to see the fury on his face when they turned a corner and came across a man beating a college aged boy in an abandoned alley. The one being pummeled wasn’t moving, wasn’t making a sound. But even from here, Jeno could see the blood caking his face, the way his head lolled back and forth. He was unconscious, or getting close to it.

                “Fuck…” Jeno muttered under his breath, horrified. Seoul was a city of relatively low violent crime, and he had never seen such a thing in public before. “Fuck, fuck.”

                “We’ve got to do something!” Jaemin hissed. He always was the more impulsive one; the one that acted on the urges of his heart rather than his mind.

                “That guy’s huge, we’re going to get out asses kicked.” Jeno tried to reason, though his palms were getting sweaty at the sight of his horrible violence. It was true though. He and his friends were all just kids, still slight and slender. The man over there was built from muscle. “Let’s call the police.”

                “They’re not going to get here fast enough. That guys practically beaten to a pulp already.” Jaemin said, putting down his backpack as if  in preparation to charge in.

                But suddenly, unexpectedly, Mark was charging in. As thin as he was, he was fast as a bullet, and his speed built up enough momentum for him to barrel into the burly assailant and knock him unexpectedly off his feet. Mark used his whole damned body, plowing the man off of the victim with the ferocity of an animal. The two went toppling, the momentum of his charge causing Mark to roll a few feet on his side before scrabbling to get back onto his feet. The man was up quicker though, and he was pissed.

                “What the fuck, kid?!” He shouted, but Mark did not back away. His eyes lingered on the attacker’s face. He was red faced, furious. One of his eyes were filled with blood, as if all the vessels had burst and had leaked out into the whites of his eyes. How painful. The motherfucker deserved it.

                Then Mark’s eyes drifted to the beaten man on the floor, and he realized with a start that he recognized him. It was the random person he and his brother had ran into on Taeyong’s day off. He’d looked distraught and was walking through the park with a haunted look on his face. He remembered Taeyong saying later that he was a regular customer at his bar.

                “Get away from him.” Mark said, his voice somehow steady, though he didn’t feel all that sure of himself. If this was going to be a fight, he would definitely, without a doubt lose. He wasn’t a fighter, he was a reasoner. But he wasn’t sure he could reason himself out of this now. “I don’t know what this is about, but you’ve done enough. This guy is passed out and bleeding. That’s enough.”

                “It’s not enough kid, he deserves more.” The man growled, trying to push past Mark, but he stepped in his path. His eyes glinted dangerously and Mark could see his fuse was about to blow.

                “Out of my way.” He said quietly, his hands clenching.

                Mark stood his ground and shook his head. He knew right from wrong, and he refused to quail just because he as scared. Abruptly, he was on the ground and he realized that a ferocious backhand had landed him there. He sputtered, spitting out blood from where he’d bit his tongue on impact. Distantly, he heard his friends shouting out in anger, their footsteps running towards them. Jeno grabbed the assailant by the stomach, dragging him rather uselessly backwards away from Mark, but it was immediately obvious he wouldn’t be able to hold on for long and sure enough, the next moment Jeno was toppling over. He was sprawled clumsily across Mark’s frame, hopelessly winded from a jab to the stomach.

                _Shit._ Mark thought. _Shit shit._

The man’s focus had shifted onto the two of them. If anything, he looked pleased to have two new targets to release his pent up anger on. Jaehyun had not screamed or begged. Beating him had not been a satisfactory way to blow off steam. But these were just kids, they would probably cry if kicked around just enough.

                Mark looked around him desperately for anything: a bottle, a trashcan lid, a big rock,; anything that could be used as a weapon but there was nothing but gravel all around him. Gravel…

                As the man bent to grab Jeno by the collar, Mark grabbed a handful of gravel and sand and hurled it into his face. The man recoiled, grunting as the sand embedded themselves into his already damaged eyes, but it didn’t stop him for long. Even blindly groping, he managed to grab onto Jeno’s shirt and drag him up to his knees.

                It was over, they’d lost.

                _At least Jaemin got away._ Mark thought dully because their other friend was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he had run to find some police officers?

                But no, he hadn’t run. Mark’s eyes widened as he saw his friend sneaking forward, something shining in his hand. And then he latched on to their attacker, holding something up to his throat. A knife? Jaemin didn’t own any weapons. He didn’t believe in them. So where had he randomly picked up a knife?

                “Put your hands up in the air.” Jaemin said, his voice a lot more self assured than his face looked. Mark could see that his hands were shaking,  but nonetheless, he persisted. “Hands up in the air, or I cut your fucking throat.”

                “The police are on their way.” Jaemin lied. He hadn’t had time to find his phone and call the police. But he wanted the man to believe any further fighting was hopeless and would just incriminate him more.

                The man groaned, unable to believe he’d been bested by a bunch of kids and was being held up by a knife that he had dropped earlier. He wanted nothing more than to thrash all of them and leave their passed out bodies stacked on top of each other, but he couldn’t afford to have another strike on his criminal record. Especially not with the pending sexual assault charges he was in and out of court trying to fight.

                Before anyone could react, the man threw Jaemin off of his body, but instead of reaching for them, he barreled past. He was making a run for it.

                “Hey!” Jaemin shouted, but Jeno held him back.

                “Fuck, let him go man. Let him go. We’re lucky we aren’t dead now.” Jeno gasped, grasping Jaemin’s thin wrists. The younger looked down at his hands, his fist quivering around the handle of the blade. As if he were holding something disgusting, Jaemin threw the knife on the ground, falling to his knees as all of the adrenaline left his body. His palm was bloodied from where he’d picked up the knife blade-first in his panic. He felt the strange urge to laugh or cry, but he wasn’t sure which.

                “Hey! Wake up. Are you okay?” Mark was asking the beaten man on the floor. He rolled Jaehyun over and found with relief that he was clinging to consciousness by a thread. He was bloodied, the entire front of his face doused in red, but his eyes were blinking open. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you to a hospital.”

                The man shook his head slowly, saying something unintelligible.

                “What?” Mark asked, leaning closer.

                “No. No health insurance. No money. Leave me. I’m fine.” He muttered before he finally passed out.

                “Fine, my ass.” Jaemin said, wrapping his cut palms in a piece of fabric.

                “What do we do?” Jeno asked, his eyes wide and afraid. He was dabbing away the blood from Jaehyun’s face with his sleeve and the remnants of a bottle of water.

                It wasn’t even a question, they all knew what to do. If this stranger refused to go to the hospital, the next best thing would be for Mark to tend to him. He’d mended enough horrible gashes on Taeyong after his brother had had an accident with a knife or a cocktail glass at work.

                “My home. Hurry.” Mark said. The three young boys hoisted Jaehyun’s dead weight up, Mark and Jeno slinging his arms over both of their shoulders; supporting him. Jaemin reached out to pull Jaehyun’s hood over his head, masking the cuts and scrapes on his face, hoping fervently that it just looked like they were escorting some drunk guy home.

                “I can’t believe this. I fucking can’t believe what just happened.” Jeno kept repeating as they stumbled towards Mark’s home. Overhead, the sky dampened; washing everything over with warm rain as if to comfort them.

               


	10. Precipice

~~

Chapter 10

~~

 

                “Put him on the rug.” Mark said, locking the door behind him. It was nearing 9pm, and his brother wouldn’t be home from work for several hours, though he definitely wished he had adult guidance right about now. Mark wasn’t sure if he was making the right decision to not take this man to the hospital despite his wishes. But his injuries did not look too bad, and he surely didn’t want this stranger to incur debt from hospital fees if he had no money to pay it off.

                They laid the man out on the throw rug, his head lolling uselessly. Jaemin was already in the medicine cabinet, pulling out gauze and antisceptic, and he stumbled back into the living room with an armful of other random crap they probably wouldn’t need like sleeping pills and his brother’s klonopin.

                “Thank you.” Mark muttered, unbuttoning the stranger’s shirt to reveal some dark, horrible bruising along his ribcage. He felt along the ridges of bone and breathed deeply in relief. He didn’t feel any breaks in the ribs, but judging from the man’s labored breathing, he had probably fractured some. Even so, there was very little Mark could do about a fractured rib. They healed on their own in a matter of weeks. Tentatively, he placed a cold compress over the darkened bruises and moved on. The man’s face had taken a good amount of abuse during the altercation. One of his eyes was swelling up, and there was a bulge rising on the back of his head from where he had been kicked. Mark would bet his life that he would be concussed when he woke up.

                “Bring me some warm water and a clean cloth.” Mark said, and Jeno jumped up to put some water to boil.

                Mark was in his element. After all the wanted to be a doctor in the future. He wanted to make a living out of helping people, and even at his young age, he was already looking into medical school. And God knew he’d had enough practice tending to minor injuries because of his brother. At least once a month, Taeyong would come home from work absolutely hammered with a terrible gash on his hands or arms from random knife or glass mishaps. He would usually pass out without properly tending to them, and Mark would steal into his room in the early mornings before he had to head to school . As his brother slept away the hangover, Mark would quietly unwrap the clumsy bandages, sterilize and treat the cuts, and redress the wounds with fresh bindings. Healing was what he was good at. It was his only real calling, and he worked with complete confidence now.

                Jeno brought over a basin of hot water with some clean, boiled rags as Mark bent over the stranger’s body with a pair of tweezers. During the fight, the man had skidded on the ground palm and facefirst, and there was a good amount of errant shards of glass  and rock embedded in his hands and left cheek. Tentatively, Mark tweezed them out, the scent of blood dizzying him. Jeno was looking away, but Jaemin watched wide eyed.

                Once Mark had managed to get most of the embedded glass out of the man’s pallid skin, he dabbed away at the blood with the hot rags that he rinsed continuously to keep it hot and clean. The basin of boiled water was quickly turning pink with residual blood and Jeno ran to boil some more to replace it.

                Mark was right when he’d deemed the man’s injuries to be mostly superficial. There was nothing he would have needed to get treated at the hospital. Aside from the almost certain concussion and fractured rib that would eventually heal on their own, there was nothing but cuts and bruises. With a relieved sigh, Mark uncapped the woundseal powder, shaking a light dusting over the deeper cuts, and pressing down until they formed a makeshift scab. For the lighter scrapes, he dabbed on some antisceptic ointment and began bandaging them up.

                Despite the blood, the ritual of this work was calming for Mark. It allowed him a moment to get back into his head and remember that one strange time they had run into each other. Mark had been with his brother at the time, coming home from a long excursion through the park. This man had barreled past them looking on the verge of mental breakdown, and Taeyong had recognized him from work, had grabbed onto his wrist as if he wanted to say something; but in the end, he had just let him go. The whole incident had been strange to Mark. His brother was such a bleeding heart, he helped people even at an inconvenience to himself. Hell, Mark was so used to Taeyong offering their couch to distraught or too drunk to get themselves home customers from work that they had eventually invested in an air-mattress. So seeing Taeyong let this particular man go without even a question when he had been so clearly upset had been jarring.

                His work done, Mark sat back to study this stranger. He was in his early twenties, looked precocious and handsome and aristocratic. But there was something in his frayed clothing and dark hair that was a bit overdue for a cut that suggested something a bit more barebones about him. Even in unconsciousness, his brow was knit with worry.

                He and his best friends huddled around this stranger, there was a strange gravity about this situation that Mark couldn’t pinpoint. Somehow it felt as though every instance of their days had been carefully orchestrated by something larger than him to result in their collision. Mark wasn’t sure why he felt this way, but he couldn’t shake it. His mouth had gone dry, his heart thudding as though his body were aware of a danger his mind wasn’t yet.

                “What now?” Jeno asked.

                “Let’s inflate the air mattress.” Mark said.

                After all was said and done, the stranger was all patched up and tucked in to the air mattress, his breath a little labored from his probable rib injury; but otherwise peaceful. He’d been receiving text messages from someone named Ten all night, and that’s how they learned his name: Jaehyun.

                _Jung Jaehyun, where are you? Your mother called me all distraught. What happened? Where are you crashing tonight? Come over, man. You know my couch is always open for you, whenever you need it, for however long._ The texts had said before Mark powered down the beat-up Nokia phone to save battery. Mark wasn’t dumb, he knew how to put two and two together. Judging from these texts, this young man who looked no older than his brother’s age, who had the face of a cover model and the aura of an aristocrat; was homeless.

                Now the three friends were sitting in a tight circle, passing a mug of creamy nut tea between them, the flavor of honey and walnut calming them and fortifying their stomachs. Jeno and Jaemin had offered to spend the night on the off chance that Jaehyun woke up and turned out to be a psychopathic axe murderer. Jaemin’s wounded palms were wrapped in bandages as well, and the adrenaline of the evening had worn off and left him with a film of disgust. A stark pacifist, he couldn’t believe he’d held a weapon. He’d always been so against arms of any sort, he couldn’t believe he’d held a blade to someone’s throat, even if it was to save his friends. This would be a turning point in their lives, though they weren’t sure exactly how. It was the feeling that the protective skin of childhood had been ripped away too quickly leaving them raw and reluctantly adult. It was the feeling they were standing on a precipice with nothing to catch their fall, but they still had no choice but to jump.

                “We could have died back there, you know.” Jeno says, his voice quivering, remembering what it felt like to hit the pavement spine-first and see nothing but stars  and a face sneering down at them with hatred.

                “And yet here we are.” Jaemin said evenly, his palm throbbing.

                “It’s strange.” Mark said suddenly. He’d been exceptionally quiet all evening after finishing patching up Jaehyun’s wounds. It wasn’t uncharacteristic for Mark to be silent. He wasn’t very talkative by nature; but his silence had been weighted; heavy. Jaemin and Jeno both watched him.

                “It’s strange…” He continued, his dark hair reflecting almost blue in the lamplight. “But it feels like nothing that happened today was random.”

                Which, of course they knew was ridiculous. Of course it was random, an accumulation of events that culminated in them walking into that empty alley where Jaehyun was being pummeled. They hadn’t planned for any of it. They didn’t plan to get detention for goofing off in class, which lead them to leave school later than normal. They didn’t plan to get that wild craving for shaved ice that ended up delaying their walk home until the night hours, and they certainly didn’t plan to get lost in the endlessly winding alleys of Seoul that would eventually lead them to Jaehyun. It wasn’t planned, it was all objectively random.

                “Like, I feel as if I were pulled along by a string all day like a damned puppet. I don’t know why, but I feel it. Don’t you?” Mark asked, his eyes earnest.

                The table-side clock ticked slowly towards 2am. Jaehyun, in the next room, opened his eyes and saw a cream-white ceiling. In his concussed confusion, he mistook it for the roof of his childhood bedroom. He closed his eyes, turned to alleviate pressure from his aching rib, and plummeted back into darkness.

 

~

                Taeyong staggered home at 5:30am and was surprised to find Mark awake, sitting at the dining table in the near perfect dark with a cup of tea steaming in his hands. His eyes were smudged with dark shadows, indicating that he hadn’t slept yet.

                “Mark?” Taeyong asked, his eyes squinting to make out his form in the singular red glow of the alarm clock on the cabinet. “What are you doing up? Are you okay?”

                Mark stood, taking his brother gently by the hand.

                “Don’t freak out.” He whispered before pulling him towards the living room where Taeyong immediately saw that the air mattress was inflated on the floor and someone was sleeping on it. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and he looked down at the figure, a young man, his face heavily bandaged. And then he realized it: Jaehyun. It was like all the breath was knocked out of him all at once. A red thread glinted at the corner of his vision between them, as if his eyes were playing tricks on him in the blackness.

                “What is he doing here?” Taeyong asked, unable to keep the panic out of his voice. He noticed Mark flinching a little in surprise at his reaction, but he couldn’t help but feel terror when Jaehyun’s red lettering was glaring at him in accusation. How was it that Jaehyun was around every corner now, the reaper had been right. No matter what Taeyong did, it was like he couldn’t stay away.

                “He was getting beat up, so we brought him here.” Mark said, his voice wavering. “It was the right thing to do. It’s what you would have done.”

                Mark was right, of course. Taeyong had played unlikely hero for lots of people who got into the receiving end of a beating at his bar. He often let people stay over if they needed to, the air mattress was well used to accommodate all sorts of strangers. But this was different, Mark didn’t undertstand what he’d done. He didn’t understand that him sheltering Jaehyun was just getting him a little bit closer to his death. Taeyong pulled Mark into his room, shutting the door behind them before he swiveled.

                “When he wakes up in the morning, he has to leave immediately.” He said, his voice loud enough to wake Jeno and Jaemin who had been tucked into Mark’s bed. In his panic, he hadn’t even realized they were there.

                “What?! Why?” Mark asked.

                “Don’t question me Mark, he can’t stay. That’s an order.” Taeyong hissed. Jeno and Jaemin’s eyes were passing between the siblings in abject confusion. Taeyong was not forceful, he’d never ordered Mark to do anything in his life.

                “What’s gotten into you, hyung? You let random people stay with us all the time, why is this any different? You know him, right? Didn’t you say that he was a regular customer?”

                “I don’t need to give an explanation as to who I do or do not let into my home, Mark. Don’t forget who pays the rent here.” 

                “But he’s injured! He has a cracked rib and probably has a concussion. How can you cast him out in that condition?”

                A twinge of guilt passed through Taeyong. With the blankets pulled up, he hadn’t been able to see the extent of his injuries. He could see the confusion in the three boy’s eyes, a dismantling of the deep regard of his kindness. But what they thought of him now, was not important. Jaehyun’s life was. And he was willing to seem cruel if it meant getting him out of disaster’s path. And it was him. He was disaster.  

                “It’s not like those are fatal injuries Mark, tell him to recover at home or in the hospital.”

                Mark shook his head slowly, sadly.

                “I already tried to take him to the hospital, but he refused to go. Said he had no health insurance.”

                That was a surprise. This boy who looked like a CEO’s son had no health insurance? At the bar, Jaehyun often made light hearted comments about his bare-bones living.

 _You get what you pay for, and I’m free._ Jaehyun had said once over whiskey, but Taeyong had always taken these off handed comments as simply jokes.  The jests of a rich boy who wanted to seem more rugged and modest than he really was.

“And I’m not sure he has a place to go right now, hyung.” Mark said, shuffling his feet before explaining the parade of texts on Jaehyun’s phone that suggested that he had no home, and for some reason was continuously declining a friend’s offer to couch surf.

Taeyong couldn’t believe his ears. Homeless. Homeless? He remembered all those countless nights over the past couple months in which Jaehyun would stay at his bar until closing, stumbling out in the morning completely hammered with his trademark duffel bag. Where had he taken refuge all those days? Taeyong imagined him drunk and curled up on the ground, on a park bench, under a thin layer of newspapers, and he felt sick to his stomach. How had such an obviously bright college student ended up in this position? His mouth had gone dry as he stared at Mark looking at him sternly. He could already see that Mark would be immovable on this. He could see the hurt and disappointment in his brother’s eyes.

“He can stay until he recovers.” Taeyong said finally after a long silence. Rib fractures and concussions usually resolved themselves in a month. A month seemed like an awfully long time to house someone that fate apparently determined he would end up killing, but Taeyong just didn’t have it in him to fight anymore. Not now, at least. “He stays until he’s healthy, but as soon as he is, he leaves. We’re not a halfway house, Mark. He can’t stay with us for long.”

“Fine.” Mark says with a little more frost than Taeyong is used to hearing from him. Jaemin and Jeno have flat expressions, as if they are seeing Taeyong anew and don’t like what they see. Taeyong knows when his presence is no longer welcome.

“Go to sleep, at this rate you’ll be sleeping in until evening.” Taeyong says, leaving the room and shutting the door softly behind him.

 

~

 

                Mark, Jeno and Jaemin have long since fallen asleep, but Taeyong has not yet. Despite having worked an eleven hour shift, he’s restless. Outside, the sun has risen; as have the morning birds larking in the branches that scratch their wide windows.

                _Dear god._ Taeyong thinks as he paces around the house, compulsively cleaning things to try and silence his mind, but nothing works. His hands are shaking. _Dear god._

It seems as though his reckoning has come early. He walks into the living room where Jaehyun sleeps on the air mattress; his black hair sticking to his forehead with a sheen of sweat. He’s obviously in pain, and Taeyong feels a twinge of guilt. He wants to help him, he really and genuinely does. He hates the ultimatum he had to put on Mark, but what else could he have done? He tries to ignore Jaehyun’s red lettering as he sets to redressing his bandaged hands. The blood had soaked through the cloth so Taeyong dabbed the red away, reapplied ointment, and tightly bound his palms once again. Jaehyun’s brows knit themselves a little in his sleep, an obvious sign that even unconsciousness was not enough to hold his pain at bay.

                Next, he steals into his brother’s room where he and his two friends are sleeping tangled together like dozing puppies; legs thrown  haphazardly over each other during their restless sleep. Taeyong kneels besides Mark, pushing the hair back from his brow lovingly. He’s young, but has more backbone than Taeyong feels he will ever have, and that swells his heart with both shame and pride. But he’d disappointed Mark tonight. He’d taken his kid brother’s old image of him as his childhood hero and ripped it to shreds.

                “Sorry kid.” Taeyong murmers. “I wish I can be better, but I can’t. I’m so fucking afraid.”

                He lingers at Mark’s beside for a while, smoothing his younger brother’s hair back with a gentle palm as the morning light filters through the curtains. . And then he leaves, the door clicking softly in his wake. Mark waits for a moment to make sure Taeyong has really left before opening his eyes and turning to stare at the door. He’d only been feigning sleep, and he’d heard everything his brother had said. His apology, his fear. His voice rubbed raw with an unknowable aching that had plagued his brother for as long as Mark could remember.

                But most pressing of all was this: what exactly was his brother so afraid of?


	11. Safe Haven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL ABUSE OF A MINOR OMG IM SORRY

~~

Chapter 11

~

 

                During that first night, Jaehyun has nightmares.

_The school is empty/ the classroom he is in is locked and there is no one to see or hear what is about to happen/ It is winter, hail falls on the window pane and sounds like a hard knock each time/ Jaehyun wants to crawl out of his skin/ thirteen years old/ his body surprisingly frail, like he’s made of nothing but ribcage and skin/ a sweater is spread out across the desk and she puts him on it/ He trusted her/ He trusted her because she had kind eyes, and told her students sweet stories about her husband and her son who was just about their age/She told him he was clever and meant for great things/ she puts him on his back/ normally he calls her Mrs.Lee, but right now, he just whimpers about wanting to go home/ she’s pretty, or so the male students in his class always says. Jaehyun isn’t sure he agrees/ “Just let me go home”/ “you want this, pretty baby, just trust me”/ how will he explain this to his friends? His family? / her fingertips travel/ he freezes/ her hands/ are cold._

On that first night, Jaehyun wakes up twice. Once, he wakes to a strange, bleary vision of that tweaky bartender bent over him with a worry-knit brow. _It’s just a nightmare, shhhh,_ He says as he combs back the hair from his sweaty brow. He’s peeling back bandages from his arm, and Jaehyun feels the sting of antisceptic. Taeyong’s hands are tentative and tender, as if he’s delicately spreading the petals of a flower used for cocktail garnish. Jaehyun must have watched him do that hundreds of times by now. He feels his fingertips on his skin, and he isn’t afraid.

                _Dreaming._ He thinks. _This too is a dream. It must be._

                He wakes a second time to the unmistakable bustling of teenagers. He cracks open his eyes and sees sunlight filtering through an unfamiliar window, illuminating an unfamiliar room. He’s not curled up in the library broom closet, or in a cum stain love motel. He’s not in the grimy confines of a park bench or subway station. He’s not nestled in newspaper and cardboard boxes, but honest to god blankets. He hasn’t had a blanket in weeks. And then the young voices:

                “….have to freaking hurry Jaemin, we’re going to miss the bus!”

                “Do you want chocolate spread or jam on your bread, Jeno?”

                “Is that important? I don’t need anything, come on! Mark? Where is Mark?

                Footsteps stampeding around.

                “I’m coming… let me just check on…”

                Jaehyun feels a cool set of hands on his brow, and a comforting laundry detergent scent.

                “Hey? His eyes! Guys! His eyes are open! Jaehyun-hyung, can you see me? Are you awake?’

                And yes, Jaehyun is awake, but only barely. He feels disoriented and dizzy, his vision tilting violently as if seen through a kaleidoscope closing. For a moment, he sees a classroom, wavering in the heat of his own fever. Oh, he’s so fucking ill.  If he’d anything in his stomach at all except its own acids, he may have turned over to hurl, but he doesn’t have the energy so he just concentrates on breathing. On trying to focus and understand where he is, and why. Trying to fight off the growing anxiety of his nightmares and not knowing what has happened to him.

                “Sir? Don’t panic.” The boy says, his black eyes blown wide with worry. His features so simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. The bartender’s little brother. What in the world? “You’re safe here.”

                _Safe._

The concept feels foreign. Jaehyun tries to hold on, but he can’t. He falls.

~

                The bar was busy, and Taeyong was happy for the chance to immerse himself into something bodily; something he understood.

                “Yuta, the bar needs more ice.” He said, and his barback sprang into action, going towards the ice machine in the back to bring a few more crates of ice to the front. In the meantime, Taeyong plucked the drink order tickets from the printer. Three bottles of raspberry wine, three cocktails, three blended drinks. He clucked. The raspberry wine was fast and easy to serve, but blended drinks were a bitch. They only had one blender, and only so much sink space. He’d do those first.

                Yuta came back with the much needed ice, and Taeyong shoveled a few cubes into the blender with condensed coconut milk, pineapple chunks and rum.

                “Bahama mama, a Mai Tai, Blue Hawaiian, three Pina Coladas… what are we, a Tiki bar? Are we still in Seoul?” Yuta groaned, bringing down another bottle of house rum from the shelf.

                “Shut up and work.” Taeyong replied, trying to let himself get in the familiar tempo of the work grind: blend, strain, pour, ring up the register, blend, shake, strain, take a shot, pour a glass of wine, a carafe of sangria, a pitcher of beer, take another shot, grate a lemon, ignite some Bacardi 151 for those flaming cocktails college students loved so much. Shots, shots, shots.

                He was overwhelmed, and it didn’t help that Mark was blowing up his phone with text messages.

**Jaehyun woke up. He’s disoriented and slow to respond.**

**But I think he’ll be okay. Definitely has concussion though.**

**Sensitive to light, so everything is off but the nightlight.**

**Doesn’t want to eat or drink. Barely talks.**

**Just stares at the ceiling. Should I be alarmed?**

                Taeyong pressed the barside bell to let the servers know to come get the drinks before picking up his phone to respond. Jaehyun, he’d almost forgotten that boy was staying with them. As if he didn’t have enough going on already.

                **Mark, you said it yourself. He’s concussed.**

**Prob won’t have an appetite for about a day. Totally normal**

**Give him some tea and let him rest. I’m sure he’ll be better tomorrow.**

**The boy had the life beat out of him a few days ago, only natural he’d act a little off.**

**Give it time.**

                A bit dismissively, Taeyong threw his cellphone underneath the cash register and continued to work. He really didn’t want to think about Jaehyun right now, or the cruel irony of him housing and taking care of someone the world had decided he would eventually kill. He wanted to work until his mind entered auto-pilot and he didn’t have to think anymore. He wanted to fall asleep and wake up in a life that was not his.

                It wasn’t that Taeyong did not feel sorry for Jaehyun. He wasn’t sure of what exact circumstances that boy had been living under, but it was obvious it wasn’t good. He and Mark had pretty much ascertained that he’d been homeless for at least the past few months, and now he was bedridden with a concussion and a few broken ribs in the house of a stranger. Taeyong didn’t know Jaehyun very well, but judging from their interactions at the bar, the boy was a creature of a great deal of pride. And this act of dependency was probably wounding.

                “So that regular customer is using your couch as a hospital room, huh?” Yuta asked much later as they sat at the empty bar, dividing tips. Yuta’s red lettering had been pulsing brighter and more insistently for a few weeks now, but it was worse than ever now. Taeyong could hardly look at him without flinching.

                “Temporarily. Just for a while, until he gets better. Mark was the one who found him, and you know I can’t say no to Mark.” Taeyong said, licking the tip of his fingers before dividing up the money. Johnny and Doyoung were sitting impatiently behind them, waiting to get paid, but at the mention of Jaehyun, Johnny chimed in.

                “Jaehyun? That college kid that always sits at the bar and just has whiskey and never orders any food? He’s staying with you?” Johnny asks, his voice as good natured and loud as ever.

                “Yeah, somehow shit turned out that way. Should only be for a month or so.” Taeyong groaned, his eyes growing bleary on him. The barside clock said it was nearing 5am, and he really wanted nothing more than to sleep.

                “Nice! He’s handsome.” Johnny mused as Doyoung and Yuta mocked him loudly about being an insatiable playboy. It was true, Johnny had quite the reputation in town as a hedonist. He fell into bed with a new person nearly every week regardless of gender or race or age group. As long as they were of age, and a warm body to hold; Johnny indulged in them.

                “Yes, I suppose he is.” Taeyong agreed blandly, continuing to divide up the tips. They made good money tonight. Excellent, in fact.

                “Not my type though.” Johnny said suddenly, studying the wall.

                “I thought everyone was your type.” Yuta jokes, pinching his arm. Johnny laughed and pulled away.

                “No, he’s too sad. I don’t like sad boy types.” Johnny said, reaching over the table to grab his share of tips. “When he’s not talking and actively being a snarky shit, he has the look of someone that’s given up on his own life.”

                Taeyong pocketed his money, reaching into his phone to check Mark’s texts that he hadn’t been able to reply to for hours.

**He hasn’t woken up for several hours.**

**Extreme lethargy is normal though. For concussions, I mean.**

**If you’re hungry when you get home, there is rice on the stove. And soup.**

**I’m going to bed, hyung. Be safe.**

“He reminds me of you, in that way TY.” Johnny continued as they turned off all the bar lights in preparation to leave. “He’s a member of the sad-pretty-boy’s club, and you’re the president of it.”

                Doyoung and Yuta chuckled while Taeyong just rolled his eyes, giving Johnny a playful shove as they walked out the door into the blue, early morning air.

~

                When Jaehyun regained consciousness, the sun was streaming through the curtains with an intensity that suggested it was mid-day. Jaehyun groaned, his eyes felt unnaturally sensitive, as if the light was digging into his corneas with hot, tendrilled fingers. His throat was exceptionally dry, as was his mouth, and he had the strangest feeling that he was not in control of his body. His own limbs felt foreign to him, as if they weren’t completely under his control anymore. All of his movements were slow and jerky, and he felt a dizziness that almost made him whimper when he tried to sit up.

                Slowly, he tried to gather his bearings. He had snippets of memories from his restless sleep of a foreign room, and unfamiliar faces peering down at him, but they ran through his mind like a sieve when he tried to collect them. He was in a modest but cozy home. All around him was an explosion of books and old records. Polaroids covered every bare inch of the walls in a haphazard splatter of faded faces and landscapes. This living room felt lived in and had a humble warmth about it that the sterile walls of his childhood mansion never had. He was tangled in a heavy wool blanket that smelled of something sweet and vaguely vanilla, and beside his airmattress was a mug of water and some biscuits.

                He was too dizzy to eat, but Jaehyun felt like he could drink a gallon of water and still feel like he had a mouthful of cotton. He grabbed the mug, drinking like a parched animal. He wasn’t sure where he was, or exactly how he got there, but he could worry about that later.

                “Ah! You’re finally awake!” A voice called from across the room, accompanied by footsteps. It was the bartender’s little brother; the one he had run into in the park that day. Jaehyun squinted at him, trying to get his eyes to focus.

                “Oh, yeah sorry. I know it’s kind of bright here right now, but I’m going to run out and get darker curtains soon.” The boy said apologetically before reaching out a hand. “My name is Mark. I believe we’ve met before.”

                Jaehyun shook the boys hand, remembering bits and flashes of the evening in the park. They’d run into each other a mere hour after he’d beat up that rapist in the love motel. All in all, it wasn’t a day he wanted to think of.

                “You’re Taeyong’s brother.” Jaehyun said matter of factly. Mark nodded.

                There was something about the boy that was so unhusked and so unguardedly kind that it forced Jaehyun to dismantle his walls. Jaehyun dealt with all unfamiliar situations and people with a certain amount of guile and cunning and, though he hated to admit it, manipulation. It was a defense mechanism that he’d developed since childhood. But somehow, it was obvious that such tactics would have no effect on Mark. He was too genuine to be fooled or swayed by veneers and so he just dropped it. He let himself be as vulnerable as he felt.

                “What happened to me?”

                “You don’t remember?” Mark asked, reaching over to take Jaehyun’s hand in his, turning it over to get to the bandages on his palm. Jaehyun almost flinched away, but didn’t. The kid obviously meant no harm, and he knew what he was doing. “To be brief, you got attacked in an alley. My friends and I came across you and brought you here since… you said you couldn’t afford the hospital.”

                He unwrapped the bandages, and Jaehyun saw that his palms were covered in deep scrapes, his knuckles knotted in newly forming scar tissue. But there was no more open bleeding. They would scab, and most  likely scar, but he didn’t care about that. He must have been pretty badly pummeled if he could barely remember any of it. He remembered walking aimlessly after that disasterous reunion with his mother, and then he remembered being knocked onto the ground by a heavy, fuming body. And then beyond that, it was all a blur. Perhaps that was for the best.

                “Thank you. You didn’t have to help me.” Jaehyun said softly, fully aware that the kid must have put his own neck on the line to save him; a veritable stranger. And Mark was just a kid. Jaehyun had never felt so ashamed.

                “No, I’m glad I did.” Mark said, dabbing a little more antisceptic on Jaehyun’s palms before pouring him more water from the pitcher on the side table. “How are you feeling?”

                “Tired.” Jaehyun responded. “But mostly okay. My head and eyes and sides kind of hurt.”

                Mark nodded. “I suspect that you have a concussion and a rib fracture. That bastard was kicking you pretty hard. But don’t worry, those heal on their own in a matter of weeks. You should be feeling better in no time.”

                “Thanks to you, Mr.Junior medic.” Jaehyun said, holding up his bandaged hands. Mark beamed at the compliment. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll just collect myself for a moment and be out of your hair by tonight.” Jaehyun said. The thought of sleeping outside in this condition sent quivers through him, so he supposed he would shell out the money for a bathhouse.

                Mark shook his head sternly.

                “No, no way. You’re not leaving until you get better.”

                He said it with such conviction that Jaehyun immediately understood Mark knew he had nowhere else to go. He wasn’t sure how the kid had found this out about him, but there it was: that knowing gaze that suggested no pedantic pity, but only a want to help.

“I really don’t want to burden you.” Jaehyun said.

                “No, it’s not a problem! I already talked to my brother about it, and he said its fine. Besides, you might suffer from some fainting spells or nausea from the head injury, so it’s really best that you have a safe place to be if it happens.”

                Jaehyun really did mean to decline. He’d been so independent for the past few months, relying on nothing but himself to find shelter and get by, no matter how modest the means. The mere thought of leaning on a kid and his barely-older brother made the palms of Jaehyun’s hands clammy with discomfort. It was obvious just by judging at the modesty of the home and their belongings that Taeyong was not exactly raking it in working in the night-life industry, and he didn’t want to further burden him financially by having to take another person under his wing, no matter how temporarily. Jaehyun opened his mouth to politely decline, but Mark was looking at him with such welcome that it hinged his jaw shut. The kid genuinely wanted him to stay, he welcomed him. How long had it been since Jaehyun had felt welcomed by anyone? Not by his own mother or father, certainly. It’d been months now, and he was surprised to realize how  much he _wanted_ this. How desperately he _needed_ to be wanted and accepted by anyone.

                In that moment, Jaehyun was washed over with memories of his past few months. He saw himself sneaking around in the library at night, desperately hoping the janitors would leave quickly so he could close up and sleep in the broom closet nestled amongst dirty mops and bug repellant. He saw himself curled up on the gum-stuck ground of abandoned subway stops, listening to rats jackaling the deep inner chambers of where the trains came and went. He saw himself in ratty motel rooms and park benches, taking refuge from sudden rain under small canopies that still left him drenched and shivering. He remembered all this like the unfurling of an old film reel, and he realized that the kindness on Mark’s face felt like sanctuary.

                And didn’t he deserve, after so many months of lonely struggle, to be sheltered and secure for just a few weeks while he healed? Why should he refuse this?

                “Thank you.” Jaehyun said, his voice a little breathy and more unhusked than he’d intended. He doesn’t think he’s ever said those two words and meant it more. “Really. Thank you. So much. And I’m sorry for the trouble.”

                Mark smiles, and it makes him look much younger than he actually is.

                “Don’t apologize, we’re happy to have you.” He says, standing up with a small stretch. “I have to run out for a study group and won’t be home until tomorrow, but Taeyong-hyung is working a half shift today and should be home by eleven. If you get hungry, I made some soup for you two, and the rice cooker is ready to go. Help yourself.”

                The boy left, the house seeming suddenly cavernous in his absence. Jaehyun laid back down on the air mattress, feeling strange and light and unknowable. And it was only after several long moments of trying to give this foreign feeling a name that he realized what it was: he felt safe.

                This was what it felt like to not be afraid. He’d almost forgotten.  


	12. Human Acts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoa, this is a super long chapter. But I'm finally glad I got to write about something happier for once. The excerpt in this chapter is from a book called "Human Acts" by Han Kang, which I highly recommend if you want to be floored (and depressed). Also, there is a cameo by Jungkook in this chapter, because in addition to being an NCTzen, I'm also BTS trash xD

~

Chapter 12

~

 

                Taeyong was no stranger to oddities. He himself was an oddity. His curse, his penchant for being visited by reapers, his profession that kept him awake through the witching hours until he forgot what the world looked like drenched in sunlight. Everything about him was strange, and he liked to think that very little was able to faze him.

                That had been, of course, until a certain Jung Jaehyun stumbled drunkenly into his life one rainy day and razed the floorboards of his life up into splintered tatters. And suddenly his days that he’d normalized was suddenly uncanny again.

                Even for Taeyong, this particular scene felt like fiction: sitting demurely at the dinner table with a glass of wine. Across from him, Jaehyun was listlessly sipping on some soup. His right eye swelled up purple, and part of his cheek still raw and mottled from where it hit the pavement. Above his head, the words _Lee Taeyong_ throbbed a dull, constant crimson. Jaehyun’s vision was still hyper-sensitive because of his head injury, so they were eating in near darkness; just the glow of the nightlights and television screen illuminating their dinners. How had Taeyong’s life come to this? Breaking bread with someone who would die because of him?

                They had been eating in almost complete silence for twenty minutes until Jaehyun finally broke it.

                “So where is Mark?” He asked, piercing into a piece of grilled mackerel, lifting up the buttery flesh with the end of his chopstick.

                “He’s staying over at his friend Jaemin’s house today. It’s finals time so they’re cramming.” Taeyong said, his voice a little icier than he wished. Taeyong was not a cold person. He was actually the opposite of cold, but it seemed counter intuitive to let Jaehyun get too comfortable around him. Jaehyun shouldn’t feel safe around him, because he wasn’t.

                “He’s a good kid.” Jaehyun said, seemingly unbothered by Taeyong’s tone. “Really good. Especially for his age.”

                “What’s wrong with his age?”

                Jaehyun chuckled humorlessly. “Teens? Are you kidding me? What’s not wrong with teenagers? The puberty, the angst, the endless drive to prove themselves at all costs?”

                “Sounds like projection. You must have been terrible.” Taeyong said, and Jaehyun cracked a real smile then. A small, real smile. Taeyong tried not to feel pleased to see it.

                “Yeah, I guess I was. Or so I’ve been told.” His smile fell a little, and he took a sip of water. Taeyong saw him eyeing his wine yearningly, but he was on too many painkillers to drink. Taeyong wondered again if Jaehyun had an actual problem with alcoholism, but he pushed it out of his mind. At least the kid had enough restraint to stay away from booze with the cocktail of painkillers he was currently on. That was more than what he could say about some of the other regulars.

                “Mark is wonderful.” Taeyong said, punctuating the silence. “He’s a great, great, great kid. He’s empathetic to a fault, generous, kind, patient….I honestly don’t know where he gets these traits because our parents are none of those things.”

                “Well, clearly it comes from somewhere. You’re not half bad yourself.” Jaehyun said, not looking up from his plate. Taeyong ignored the comment, because it was false.

                “It’s almost to the point where I wish he would act more like a normal teenage kid, you know? I’ve left him alone almost every day for years, he has to cook, clean and do pretty much everything around the house all by himself. It must be stressful and lonesome, but never a peep out of him. If he bitched and whined and rebelled like other kids, I might feel less guilty.”

                The television was now playing old music videos, the apartment suddenly filled with melancholic music about love and partings.

                “Can I ask where your parents are, through all this?” Jaehyun asked, his eyes probing Taeyong  “You referenced having him under your care for a few years, but you look like you barely entered your twenties yourself.”

                Jaehyun was being very delicate, but the curiosity was ripening on his face. Aside from his wit and intense pride, it seemed like an inherent nosiness and thirst for knowledge were traits Jaehyun could not temper. And what was the point in hiding it, when Jaehyun was just a temporary fixture in this house?

                “Dad left the picture a long time ago. An affair, or so I’ve been told. And mother…” Taeyong could almost hear her voice screeching in his ear, the sting of her hand across his cheek. Taeyong’s vision had given him nightmares, uncontrollable panic attacks, mood disorders. She wanted her perfect, happy little son back, but he was gone and he shivered at shadows, and at that spot right above the crown of her head. He would try to tell her she would die of a fall, but every time, he would feel a great pressure clamping his mouth shut and he would fall into hysterics and beat the ground with his knuckles until they burst. Taeyong almost believed it was inevitable that any single parent would eventually become exasperated with this, would lose control and scream and beat him like she did that one day when he was fourteen. He’d curled up on the ground and didn’t fight back as she opened up a gash on his cheek with her manicured nails. He still had that scar to this day. _I deserve this._ He’d thought. _I’m not normal, so I deserve this._

“…she lost custody.” Taeyong said blandly, the voices in his head falling into a vortex until all he could hear was the crooning melody from the TV. “Mark and I were taken in by his side of the family. But we weren’t happy with them, so I gained emancipation when I was seventeen, adopted Mark, and moved out.”

                They were done eating. They pushed aside their plates and sipped warm barley tea. Jaehyun had been exceptionally quiet, but there was a gleam of something like respect in his eyes.

                “You’ve done well.” He said quietly. “He seems happy to be with you, and he’s obviously well loved.”

                Taeyong shook his head slowly, the impossible guilt he always felt bubbling forth.

                “It’s not good enough. I’m just a kid myself, and I’m inadequate. His peers have so much more. Someone to pack their meals for them, all these gadgets and electronics I can’t afford, someone at home to help them with homework. But he doesn’t have that. He’s the one taking care of me half the time.” Taeyong said, raising his bandaged fingers as a case in point.

                Jaehyun pushed his dark hair away from his eyes, tentatively touching his swelled eyelids. Taeyong remembered when they’d first met all those months ago. He’d thought he’d be a Gangnam rich boy, waving around his daddy’s prepaid credit card. Now he was sitting in his modest kitchen in a frayed t-shirt, one of his eyes swelled half-shut. Fate apparently had a sense of humor, and it was cruel.

                “Taeyong, you love him and accept him. You have no idea how far that goes. Everything else, anything monetary or material, it’s all just meaningless noise. You’re supplying him with the only thing that actually matters worth a damn.”

                Taeyong may have been imagining it, but there was an exquisite sadness on Jaehyun’s face, as if his mind was abruptly elsewhere. His mouth hung slightly open for a bit as if he wanted to elaborate, but he seemed to decide against it, standing up to arrange the plates to clear them.

                “Thank you for the meal.” He said, the plates clinking in his grasp.

                “What are you doing? I’ll clean, go sit down or watch TV or something.” Taeyong said, trying to gently push Jaehyun away, but the boy was stubborn. He persisted, taking the dishes to the sink and whetting the sponge with soap.

                “I may be infirmed right now, but I’m not totally useless. I can wash the dishes.” He said. He looked unsteady on his feet.

                “Jaehyun, just….”

                “Let me feel just a little bit less bad about mooching off of you, please?” Jaehyun said, his eyes resolute. This was a favor. Jaehyun considered being left alone to clean up and help out around the house to alleviate his own guilt a favor. So Taeyong let him be. Feeling strange and idle, he sat down and watched Jaehyun shuffle around the kitchen and wipe the table down.

                A few hours later, as they drank tea in front of the TV, Taeyong turned to ask Jaehyun a question. He’d answered a vulnerable one, so it only seemed fair that Jaehyun reveal some of himself as well.

                “Mark told me that you’ve been homeless for a while.” Taeyong said, kicking himself mentally over his overly blunt phrasing. “Can I ask why?”

                Jaehyun didn’t turn towards him, keeping his eyes firmly glued to the game show. The tea cup was steaming in his hands, the scent of date and honey coiling up towards him.

                For a while, Taeyong thought he would be ignored. The silence extended into minutes before Jaehyun broke into a soft, singular smile. He could really look so young when he smiled. When he really smiled, that is.

                “Whoa, whoa. Too close. One step at a time, my friend.” He said, holding up his hands in mock defense, as if trying to deter a bucking horse.

                Taeyong tries not to smile and fails.

~

 

                And so they do take it one step at a time, and despite Taeyong’s best efforts, he grows comfortable. He grows used to the air mattress in the living room and the body sleeping in it. He tries to maintain distance, but he grows warmer.

                He thinks it’s seeing how happy Mark is that does it. He has dreams of medical school, so having his very own patient to treat at home seems to sit well with him. He frets over the bandage placement, dabs the cuts with alcohol, and takes personal pride as he watches the bruising fade and the cuts scab over without the telltale white film of infection.

                And he finally isn’t home alone all night anymore.

Once, Taeyong comes home from work in the early morning to find the two of them sprawled out on the air-mattress, having fallen asleep watching TV. The news is on, rambling about some distant violence in a country remote enough to seem fictitious, and Mark has fallen asleep with his hand in the popcorn bowl. Jaehyun is sleeping soundly, one arm thrown over his eyes and his body spread out across the mattress. Taeyong wonders for a moment if Jaehyun slept like this on the streets as well, but realizes that is unlikely. He’s sprawled out now because he feels safe, and Taeyong feels a deep discomfort at the thought of the boy sleeping curled up on the ground, in a train station, on a park bench, alone on the street.

 

 

 

Jaehyun’s recovered just enough to be restless. Though moving around for long stretches of time still gives him dizzy spells, he doesn’t think he can bear to just sit down and watch TV any longer. He wants to earn his keep in this house, no matter how temporary his stay. He begins to fervently clean while Mark and Taeyong are gone. He scrubs the counter tops, cleans all the dishes in the sink, and takes a broom to every crevice of the home. He cooks too, digging through the fridge to have something ready by the time Mark comes home from school. Though he hasn’t been with them long, he’s already picked up on some of their food preferences. Mark loves spicy food and is ambivalent about mushrooms. Taeyong seems sensitive to salt, and likes his beef medium-rare. He wonders when he’s had the time to pick up all these facts about his hosts. Mark comes home and looks strangely overjoyed to sit at the dinner table with company. They turn the TV off, and sit down to dinner. Jaehyun is alarmed by how natural it all feels.

 

 

 

                His rib fracture is slowly mending, enough that he can take deep breaths without shuddering in pain. He’s been at Taeyong’s for a few days now, but the wonder of having a roof over his head never leaves him. There’s a storm tonight. Thunder rattles the window panes, and lightning arcs a fiery parabola across the horizon. Taeyong is in the kitchen, brewing ginger tea. The scent of honey and clove remind him too much of comfort, and it sets him on edge. Unattended, Jaehyun walks out onto the patio barefoot, straight past the awning and into the rain. Before Taeyong can follow him outside and pull him back below the eaves, Jaehyun is already drenched.

                “Why did you go outside?” Taeyong asks later, as he unravels the wet bandages to replace with fresh ones. Jaehyun’s eyes are distant. In the lightning, everything is briefly illuminated.

                “To remind myself not to get too comfortable.” He says.

 

 

 

                “So what happened between you and your parents?” Taeyong tries again a few days later. Jaehyun is reading a textbook, highlighting as he goes along. Because of his injuries, he hasn’t been able to attend lecture, but his friend Ten had been over to drop off notes and assignments. Taeyong is organizing his monthly finances; old receipts scattered all around him for recording. They are working side by side as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But still, at this question, Jaehyun is unreadable.

                “Still too close?” Taeyong asks.

                Jaehyun makes a noise like _mmhhhm,_ before looking down at his textbook dismissively.

                Taeyong wishes he didn’t care to know, but he does.

 

               

 

Johnny and Doyoung have already left. He and Yuta are closing down the bar in comfortable silence. Yuta scrubs down the sink as Taeyong wipes condensation off the cups.

“How is the whelp?” Yuta asks, wiping his hands on his apron. His voice is tired and his red lettering is blinding.

“Don’t call him that man, he’s not that much younger than us.”

“Fine. How is the patient, doc?”

Taeyong rolls his eyes, but answers him: “He’s doing a lot better. He isn’t bed ridden anymore, at least. Should be able to leave the house with Mark and I pretty soon, I reckon.”

“How long has he been with you now? A week?” Yuta asks as Taeyong turns off the computer, opening up two beers and handing one to Yuta to celebrate the end of another twelve hour day. The two clink bottles before taking deep gulps. The bitterness of the hops bloom on their tongues like ambrosia. They sigh in pleasure and melt onto the bar-top as though their bones have liquified.

“Yeah, about a week. Feels like longer, honestly.”  Taeyong says, taking another sip while achingly massaging a knot from his shoulder. His body is going to resent having been put through this line of work in the future, he was sure of it.

“You seem more cheery lately.” Yuta says, eyeing him suspiciously. “I wonder if the kid has anything to do with it.”

“No, you’re imagining it.” Taeyong replies shortly. “He’s a nuisance.”

Yuta looks away, draining the rest of the beer and opening himself another.

“Say what you want. Just remember that he isn’t some stray, TY. Though his circumstances are unfortunate, he can’t stay with you forever.”

 

 

 

Without being told, Taeyong already knows this. He knows he shouldn’t grow too used to hearing Jaehyun’s voice carrying throughout the house when he wakes up each morning. He shouldn’t get used to three people instead of two at the dining table. He shouldn’t grow warm towards this veritable stranger seeking temporary refuge in his home.

 And yet—

 

 

 

It’s Taeyong’s day off, and Jaehyun is finally feeling well enough for outside excursions. With Mark in tow, they head to the library. Mark leaves them almost immediately for the health and medicine section. Jaehyun hasn’t reported to work for nearly two weeks, but now he falls into routine as though he’d never taken a sick leave. The stacks are an unalphabetized mess, and he pulls the books down to reorganize them. Taeyong offers to help, but he spends more time just observing Jaehyun. He didn’t think there was anything this boy loved more than single malt whiskey, but now he realized he’d been wrong. Books. He loved books more.

“Well, I am a literature major.” He says with a small chuckle. He opens the books gently so as not to put stress on the binding. He smooths out dog-eared pages. As he reads excerpts, he supports the frayed spines with his fingers, gently, like a lover might with a real body.

His eyes are tenderness.

“Have you read anything by the author Han Kang? Her novels changed my life.” Jaehyun says, pulling another book down from the stacks. The cover is a simple paperback with the title **Human Acts** emblazoned across it.

“It’s a book about the student uprising in Gwangju. The one where over 600 people were said to have been killed by troops for protesting the new government. ” Jaehyun says, opening up the book to read a passage from it. As he reads, his voice takes on a strange cadence, almost dreamlike. To an errant stranger, it may have sounded like a melody. “ _Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”_

“You should check it out and read it. I think you will like it.” Jaehyun says, passing the book along to Taeyong. The two spend the rest of the day organizing the shelves, re-alphabetizing, pulling out books with damaged spines so Jaehyun could rework them with binding glue. By the time Jaehyun’s internship hours are done and he collects his meager paycheck from the front desk, Mark has checked out a small mountain of medical books that he resolutely demands he can carry home by himself.

Outside, the sky is pink lemonade. It is dusk, and the air smells candied from all the vendors peddling honey cakes and brown sugar sweets. Mark is walking ahead of them, struggling under the weight of his books, and Jaehyun has a soft, easy smile on his face. But the passage from the book he’d been read was haunting Taeyong. In his mind’s eye, he sees 600 young students lined up hand in hand, the flag of their country waving behind them. They are resolute in their liberties and loyalties, just before the rifles turn towards them and fire. A lotus blossoming in blood. And so the pendulum of cruelty swung a full arc around.

 

 

 

 

The reaper visits Taeyong in his sleep.

 _You are playing with fire, boy._ He says. _You are really playing with fire._

 

 

 

Jaehyun’s pain is manageable now, and he no longer relies on painkillers. Which means, he can finally have a drink. Despite his misgivings, Taeyong stirs some whiskey in a rock glass with orange, bitters, and a single sugar cube. He brings the two cocktails to the sofa and hands one to Jaehyun who looks as though he’s reuniting with his first love. The heat is oppressive, and outside it is pelting warm, sub-tropic rain.

“To roofs and modern amenities to keep us dry from the storm.” Jaehyun says, raising his glass in a mock toast. Taeyong smiles and clinks glasses with him. He remembers vaguely that Jaehyun had said something similar when they first met all those months ago at the bar. Back then, Taeyong had assumed Jaehyun was distastefully joking, but the words felt different now. He meant it. Bless roofs, bless dry floors and four walls, bless it all.

And it is now when Taeyong first realizes that he finds Jaehyun lovely. His hair wet from the shower, he’s illuminated not by candle-light, but by the glow of the television screen. He is not polished, and he is not whole. There is nothing inherently romantic about this scene. And yet—

 

 

 

_Stop it Lee Taeyong. You get a hold of yourself right this second._

 

 

 

 

“I don’t believe humans are fundamentally cruel.” Taeyong says out of nowhere the next day as he ambles around the house getting ready for work.

“What?” Jaehyun asks, peeping out from behind his book.

“That passage you read me from **Human Acts** a few days ago in the library? It posited that all humans are fundamentally cruel, and that history proves this.”

“And you don’t agree?” Jaehyun asks, placing a bookmark between the pages and putting the novel down.

“No. I think people can be swayed to do evil things, but that doesn’t necessarily make them cruel. It makes them weak, but weakness and cruelty are different, I think.”

“Hmm.” Jaehyun says, wincing a little as he sits up. His rib still hurts him from where it’s been kicked in.

“What do you think?” Taeyong asks, folding back the sleeves of his shirt and smoothing back his hair with a little gel.

                Jaehyun takes a while to respond, his eyes straying towards the television that is reporting a mass shooting that has taken place somewhere in the United States. Then he considers the circumstances of his own small life.

                “I believe people are inherently cruel.”

 

~~

 

                “My parents threw me out because I fell in love.” Jaehyun said, rubbing condensation off his beer. They were sitting on the porch bench, swinging back and forth like a soft pendulum.

                Taeyong turned his eyes towards him. Jaehyun had been so tight lipped about his parents, despite Taeyong’s probing. But it seemed like he finally wanted to talk.

                “Because you fell in love?” Taeyong asked, incredulous. “Was this a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet sort of situation? Did you fall in love with a rival family’s daughter or something?”

                Jaehyun laughed, shaking his head. “No it was more of a….Romeo and Mercutio sort of situation, if you know what I mean.”

                And it clicked. Of course Taeyong knew what it meant, he was surprised he hadn’t thought about it before.

                “Oh…” he said thoughtfully. “Oh, that would have been a _very_ different play.”

                Jaehyun laughed. He almost couldn’t believe he was talking about this. He hadn’t told a soul about this, not even Ten. But somehow he felt comfortable with Taeyong here, in this temporary home life they were living.

                “Do you think differently of me?” Jaehyun asked, and Taeyong immediately shook his head no.

                Taeyong couldn’t really give two shits about someone’s sexuality. He himself vaguely identified as pan-sexual. He’d been with women and men, and some more gender-fluid individuals in between. A person’s heart mattered a lot more to him in matters of love than their gender identities. He’d never really had to struggle very hard with his sexuality. His curse had pretty much taken precedence over everything in his life, and by the time he may have had to have a difficult coming out to his family about not being straight, there was no one left to care. His mother had already lost custody, he’d already been emancipated from the rest of his family, and Mark accepted him no matter what.

                This evidently had not been the case for Jaehyun though.

                “I grew up in a church, you know. My father is a pastor, and I spent pretty much every day in the pews and singing in the choirs. I sat through lots of sermons that preached about the sins of same sex attraction. But I think everyone still hopes their family loves them enough to set aside dogma for their child, you know?”

                Taeyong nodded, reaching into the ice box to bring out another beer for Jaehyun. He would probably need another. There was something very raw about his expression now that Taeyong was not sure he was ready to see.

                “But I hid it anyways, for lots of years, I pretended like I wasn’t gay. I even had a few girlfriends. Poor girls, I used them as masks. As shields. They didn’t deserve that.” They both take another deep swig. They are tipsy, and the sweltering heat only seems to contribute to that. “And then I met him.”

                The sun in dipping down below the horizon. Sunset is coming, and Taeyong is struck by the uncanniness of this moment; how he feels suspended in a dream.

                “His name was Jungkook, and I met him at a youth group retreat, of all things. We were the same age, so we were paired for every activity. We became friends. And then, just organically, it became something different.”

                He doesn’t want it to, but Jaehyun’s mind wanders. He remembers Jungkook’s eyes wandering over towards him during worship. He remembers excursions through the campgrounds, managing to cajole neighboring campers into giving them some beer. Opening up the bottles on the riverside, the black rocks hot beneath their backs, how easily they could make each other laugh until they cried. They caught little darting fish in the creek between their cupped hands and felt merciful and Godlike at their release. They waded in the rapids until their pants were drenched through, but they didn't grow cold because warmth is an element of happiness.This was a first. His heart had never felt so light. And then later, on their last day of the retreat, they are together in a verdant field. They are alone, the grasses wild and overgrown, swaying higher than their waists. Their feet sound like small wild-fires brushing through the yellowed grasses. _Jae, you’re special to me, and I want to show you I mean it. Tell me if you want me to stop, okay?_ Jungkook’s lips pressed gently onto his.  He tasted like the wild-flower honey they’d sucked from foraged honeycombs earlier that day. They knelt in the tall grass and shed their clothes like useless cocoons. They were new and bright things, mapping the expanse of each other’s bodies. Neither were virgins, but it had never been like this. Jaehyun had never felt hands reaching down his waist without wanting to escape. They rocked together reverently, and with care. This was different from that first time when he’d been trapped in the classroom with that covetous teacher who said pretty, manipulative things as she forced off his belt.

                It was different this time. He was not afraid.

                But when they walked back to camp later, the church counselors were waiting up for them, their faces deeply troubled.

                “We’d been seen by one of the other kids.” Jaehyun said, shaking his head to dispel the memory. It had been several months, almost a year since he’d last seen Jungkook, but he still didn’t like to think of it. The wound still felt fresh. “And they told the church counselors about us. My father drove for five hours to come get me. I’d never seen him so… angry. I thought he was going to kill me. He beat the crap out of me in front of everyone, and no one tried to intervene but Kookie. Can you imagine? Full grown adults, responsible for the teens safety, and they just idly watch as a father thrashes his son half to death in the middle of a public camping ground. He was calling me a fag. Kookie was crying and cussing. They had to hold him down. And then my dad dragged me into his car, took me home, and I never saw Jungkook again. I’ve heard his family moved back to Busan, but I’m not sure. We haven’t spoken since. Probably for the best. I doubt he’d be able to look at me now without feeling trauma. Or guilt.”

                Taeyong was speechless with sympathy. He was no stranger to poor parenting, but that level of public humiliation was outside his realm of comprehension. But what was most troubling was Jaehyun’s expression. There was a poignant yearning for the father, as if he still wanted acceptance. Perhaps that was all anyone ever really wanted was to be seen and accepted as they are.

                “Your father was wrong.” Taeyong said firmly. “You didn’t deserve that, and he made an unforgiveable mistake to treat you like that.”

                Jaehyun nodded.

                “I know. I know.” He sighed. “We tried for a while after that to continue on as normal. My father literally did not bring it up to me for months, as if it never happened. He tried to set me up on blind dates with girls, and I went on them because what else could I do? And then, finally I couldn’t handle living like that anymore, so I sat him down and tried to have a conversation with him father to son. I wanted him to understand I was gay, and had no choice in the matter. And yeah, he blew up at me. He disowned me, and revoked all of my savings. And that’s how I ended up how I did.”

                Taeyong sat dumbstruck. The sun was a mere sliver on the horizon now, the sky orange and dim.

                “You’ve been so curious about the reason behind my circumstances. Are ya happy now?” Jaehyun asked with a small smile.

                “No.” Taeyong said dumbly, and Jaehyun chuckled. He drained his beer and brought out yet another from the ice box. His face felt warm. He had a nice buzz going on, and he felt good. Despite his normally private nature, it felt good to get all of this off of his chest. It was cathartic. He could see now why people shelled out so much money for a therapist to just listen to them vent for an hour.

                “And you know what’s really fucked up, even more than what happened on that camp ground that day, more than getting disowned by my own father?” Jaehyun’s speech was just starting to slur a little. “Is that when I was in middle school, a teacher had asked me to stay after school under the pretense of helping organize papers. And then when everyone was gone, she locked the doors and…”

                Jaehyun’s voice wavered and he stopped there. There was no reason to elaborate, it was immediately obvious to Taeyong what he was insinuating. It was like an ice cold rock had settled in the pit of his stomach. Assaulted by a teacher, a trusted adult at that young age. Jesus Christ. Taeyong was not sure if he was more angry or horrified.

                “It fucked me up, Taeyong. I was inconsolable for a week. I sat in the shower and scrubbed my skin so hard it bled. I ditched classes because I was afraid to see that teacher, and everyone started calling me a slacker. But in reality, I was just fucking terrified. And then I finally decided I needed support, so I confided in my father.” Jaehyun’s hands were quivering a little, and he tried desperately to still them. “And he didn’t give a shit. He laughed it off because that teacher was a woman, and she was young and pretty. Nevermind the fact that I’d pretty much begged her to stop, or that she was an authority figure I had trusted and she violated that trust; my father said I was lucky. That all boys had fantasies about their female teachers, and I was just lucky enough to have it fulfilled. Can you believe that?”

                Taeyong shook his head. It was too horrible to comprehend. God forbid, if Mark ever came home with that sort of traumatic news, Taeyong would probably be going to jail for arson. He would set the teacher’s goddamned house on fire, nevermind if it were a man or woman. They would be dead.

                “So my father didn’t care that I’d been raped by a female teacher, but when I’d consented to be with a boy I loved and trusted… that was the unforgiveable sin.” Jaehyun put down the bottle of beer, thoroughly drunk now. He leaned his head back, listening to the pendulum of the squeaky porch swing. Taeyong was looking at his hands, saddened, horrified. Suddenly, Jaehyun regretted everything. What sort of weakness had come over him to suddenly confide like that?

                “Don’t you dare pity me.” Jaehyun said toxically. “I hate that shit.”

                “I know, I know.” Taeyong said, holding his hands up in a placatory manner. “I don’t pity you. I don’t feel sorry for you.”

                A lie.

                The sun was entirely down now, and darkness reigned. The fireflies were beginning to come out, illuminating the sky like miniature lanterns.

                “But I do accept you. Everything about you, I accept. You’re not wrong, you’re not broken. I think you’re very strong.”

                Jaehyun didn’t want to burst into tears on this porch swing, so he thanks every deity in the sky when he sees Mark and his two young friends walking home from the distance.

                “Oh look, it’s your brother.” Jaehyun said, thankful for the diversion. He never did do well with emotional talks. He stood, waving his hands. “Hey kids!”

                Mark, Jeno and Jaemin started running towards them. Undoubtedly hungry from their long study session, and Taeyong shuffled inside to begin preparing dinner.

                Mark was the first to make it home, and he gave Jaehyun an eager high-five.

                “Hey kid, welcome home.” Jaehyun said happily, too happily, before realizing that the hourglass of their time together was quickly draining towards empty.

               

~

 

Logically, Jaehyun knows this is all temporary. It’s been a few weeks, and he is almost completely recovered. In another week, give or take, he’ll no longer have any reason to stay with Taeyong and Mark. In a week, he’ll have to pack up his duffel bag, and return to the streets and take refuge at defunct bus stops and unpatrolled subway stops again. He’ll go back to showering in gym locker rooms and bath houses, and eating 7-11 ramen for every meal.

This luxury is temporary.

But sitting around the dinner table, watching Taeyong dish up everyone’s food, Mark laughing brightly, Jeno and Jaemin’s endless bickering; all this human music, Jaehyun fools himself awhile.


	13. TEMPORARY HIATUS

Hi everyone,

 

Sorry it's been a long time since I've updated. Things have been pretty crazy with internships/ part time job preparing for the next school year so I've kind of lost the drive for the time being to write this story. I won't abandon it, but I may not update for a while until I sort out the other stuff I have going on. Thank you for reading and I hope you guys still are interested in this story when I start writing it again <3 <3  

 

All love,

 

Joojoobe


	14. Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for being so patient with me, and leaving such kind, supportive messages <3 This story is still on semi-hiatus, just because I'm not sure how regular I can post, but I still wanted to write and update something in the meantime so I don't lose my drive for this story. I also wanted to emphasize a trigger warning for suicidality in this chapter, please read with caution.

~

Chapter 13

~

                Desire is a strange, un-tameable animal. Jaehyun knows this better than anyone. At the root of it, he knows desire has always been his greatest handicap. Desire, and his lack of impulse control. His desire for booze that he knows is ruining his body, his desire for the boy that lead to his disownment. He is not stupid. He knows this.

                And yet, he still cannot uproot this new desire that has taken seed in his stomach.

                He notices it first on a quiet night so sweltering they have all the windows and even the front door thrown open. Outside, crickets are beginning to set to their music, the chirps and the distant blaring of traffic weaving its own kind of song. The television is off in a lame attempt to keep errant heat from any technology to a minimum, and the three of them are sprawled across the floor, lethargic with heat.

                In the eyes of a stranger, they would look like a family. It is all terribly domestic: Mark is doing school-work, his pencil scratching diligently. Taeyong and Jaehyun have spread out a bunch of newspapers and are peeling garlic over it to store away in bulk for convenience. Jaehyun can’t help but notice that Taeyong is surprisingly graceful for someone who routinely come home from work injured from broken glasses and fruit-knife mishaps. He works quickly and deftly, pressing his thumb against the dull end of the knife to disrobe the clove of its stiff outer-casing. The transluscent film around the bulb, he works away with his fingers, gently pinching until it gives like a moth-wing; delicate and whole. Jaehyun’s are messy. He cleaves away the pungent flesh in gashes in an effort to peel it, but even so the crepe-y film sticks to his fingers in parts, and cling to the garlic in others. Eventually, he gives up the knife altogether and works with his nails; mangling the cloves which exact their revenge by sending sharp fumes towards his eyes.

                “Goddamn it.” Jaehyun says, frustrated. He puts his clove down on his little pile beside Taeyong’s and the difference between the two are stark. The ones Taeyong peeled are immaculate and untarnished, as if loved out of their skins; completely wiling. Jaehyun’s are in tatters, bruised, having fought him every step of the way, much like everything does.

                Taeyong chuckles, using his wrist to push his dark hair out of his eyes.

                “Jaehyun, you’re peeling garlic, not going to war. There is no need to be so aggressive.”

                Mark stifles a giggle, flipping onto his back to read more comfortably, the pen clenched firmly in his mouth.

                “This is surprisingly difficult.” Jaehyun says. He swears, he’s about to go cross-eyed if he does this much longer.

                “He has a full ride to Seoul University, a hard to come by library tech internship, speaks on panels about literary history, and yet he’s defeated by a clove of garlic.” Taeyong teases, an easy smile on his face. And then after a moment, he adds a little quieter, almost as if to himself “Try a little tenderness.”

                And his hands continue to work slowly, rolling each individual clove between his fingers until the stubbornly thin skins come away. Gentle, attentive; even in this. If Jaehyun is a forest-fire, intentionally and unintentionally singeing others as he blazes through the wreckage of his young life, Taeyong is cluster of wildflowers. Sweet and delicate, vines ever reaching outward and outward, causing harm to nothing but itself as it blooms too fully and chokes its own blossoms out. A selfless and self-sabotaging sort of life.

And Jaehyun adores this about him. He realizes it rather pathetically in this objectively unromantic setting: cross legged on the newspaper with a mound of garlic skin between them, their hands smarting with its astringent juices, the air reeking of earth and herb; Jaehyun feels something for Taeyong. A vague sense of irreplaceability and affection that he hadn’t felt since that summer at camp with Jungkook all those summers ago.

                Not quite love, but getting there.

                _No, no, no, Jaehyun boy. What are you doing?_

Later, after Mark has blundered off to bed, the two sit in the blue dark drinking a beer, trying desperately to keep cool without wasting money on the air conditioner. They talk about nothing and fan themselves. Everything about the night is languid and long, the heat stretching out even time until time becomes meaningless. Jokingly, Jaehyun presses the ice-cold bottom of his beer bottle against Taeyong’s exposed neck. The other boy hisses in surprise recoiling from the sudden cold before giving Jaehyun a light push on the shoulder in reprimand.

                “What? You said you were hot!” Jaehyun laughs, reaching out to rub away the blotch of condensation that’s been left at the base of Taeyong’s neck. His neck feels cool where the beer bottle has just been, and Jaehyun’s hands are burning up. Taeyong’s laugh wavers, and then falters when Jaehyun fails to remove his fingers. The hair at the base of his neck are soft and barely waved, coiling around his index finger. The mood in the air has shifted, and he’d be an idiot not to recognize it: desire. Jaehyun is hardly aware of what his own limbs are doing. He shifts to face Taeyong more fully, his hand remains on Taeyong’s neck, his fingers trailing softly down the sinewy line of his tendon, feather-soft. He is barely touching him, merely using his fingertips as a placeholder where Taeyong’s pulse is; but the suggestion of further contact is what sends electricity down his spine.  Jaehyun is struck by a great wonder for this moment, the fact that Taeyong is not pulling away, the fact that his mangled heart could even dare to dream of these sorts of feelings again, after all he had been through. He’d thought it was impossible.

                “What are you doing?” Taeyong asks quietly. In this moment, there is something bovine and patient about his stare, blank. Too blank in a way that makes Jaehyun certain that Taeyong has thrown up a mask of calmness, while internally thinking a mile a minute. Just a few months ago, Jaehyun wouldn’t be able to know this. But between then and now, Jaehyun had somehow learned to read the other man like a book. And underneath that languid face, Taeyong was thinking, thinking, thinking.

                _I’m trying some tenderness_. Jaehyun thinks, breathless. He stalls for a long moment, giving Taeyong the chance to pull away if he wants to; and then he closes the gap between them. Slowly, reverently. He brushes the other’s lips softly with his own, and invitation to either go further or to back out. He could practically feel Taeyong warring with himself over god knows what. The small patch where their lips are brushing feel alive with electricity. He can feel the heat of the other boy’s breath. From this close, he realized that Taeyong smells faintly herbal like basil and thyme, though Jaehyun has no idea why. He wants so badly to close this final, open mouthed gap. He wants to kiss him, but he waits for Taeyong. Because permission is more important to him than anything. Because he refuses to take what is not happily offered up.

                In the moonlight, even the world looks drunken; the colors whitewashed and slurred. Only they look truly corporeal; these two bodies suspended in vague ether; almost connected, but not. For a moment, it feels magical, like a dream. And then it unravels, as dreams often do: abrupt and unwantedly. Whatever warred in Taeyong’s eyes have evidently drawn to conclusion, and he draws away, sighing despite himself.

                “It’s late.” Taeyong says, his voice breathless from what almost happened. He picks up the empty beer bottles by their sea-green necks.

                Jaehyun doesn’t really say anything in response, even as Taeyong gets up and pads away into his own room, turning off the lights. Jaehyun lies awake for hours, his lips still feeling warm and improbable. He’d almost kissed Taeyong. He’d almost _kissed him._ He’d wanted it like a violent thirst.

                In his mind, he could hear the indistinct cadence of his father shouting at him, the impossible verve of hatred and disgust.

                _Godforsaken fag, fag, fag, fag_

                Gritting his teeth against the memory, Jaehyun throws an arm over his eyes, blocking out the milky moonlight; his head feeling like a demolition site. It seemed ridiculous, pathetic even, that amidst the smoldering embers of his life, he has time to catch feelings. But here he is: in the home of an impossibly gentle man and his equally kind brother. He’s warm, safe, accepted… dangerously comfortable. He fears if this goes on much longer he will become too happy here, and the act of leaving will destroy him.

                This was always meant to be temporary.

                In the blue light of near-dawn, Jaehyun deflates the air-mattress, and rolls up his blankets neatly. He packs up his meager belongings, leaves a note on the dining table, and sees himself out.  

_~~_

 

                Because life does not just halt because of sadness, Jaehyun carries on. He’s more shrewd about his homelessness this time. Rather than waste his money at motels or bathhouses, he goes to the city limits where the highrise apartments end and the old fashioned houses of the 1950’s begin. He carefully combs through these villages until he finds fore-closed houses with boarded up doors and windows. These abandoned houses are too old, too useless to be monitored. Jaehyun knows that they’ll eventually all be bought out and demolished to make way for the ever-swinging pendulum of build, build, build. These historic villages with their pre-war houses will all be high-end shopping centers and glistening, characterless edifices eventually.

                But for now, it is home.

                He kicks through a boarded window and climbs in. Inside, the home is moist and dusty but gloriously private. He can see that there have been squatters here before him as the floor is littered with beer cans, cellophane candy wrappers too modern to have been left by the owners of this abandoned home. In the corner, he sees a mummified bucket of fast-food chicken bones.

                Laying down a tarp, he lies down gingerly. Everything smells of soot and rot, and Jaehyun can’t help but wonder the circumstances under which the owners had left this home. It seemed that everything that breathed was eventually displaced.

                It has been roughly two weeks since Jaehyun left the security of Mark and Taeyong’s home, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t miss it. Even now, mind associated that place so much with home that it often brought him there by habit; pure muscle memory. After his classes let out and he wandered with his mind shut off, he often found himself back at the address, staring blankly at that white picket fence. The keys no longer in his pocket because he had left it behind on their coffee table with a simple note that said: _Thank you for everything._

                That place had never been his to claim.

                And yet it had reminded him of what it meant to be content and full and safe and welcomed. It had reminded him of what it meant to be lonely without those things. And that’s what Jaehyun was now. Lonley, lonely, lonely. He’d not really given it much thought before, when he was first cast out of his home. Back then, he’d been bull-headedly striving for survival and nothing past that. But now…

                _It would have been better if I’d never gone there in the first place. If Mark had never found me that night._

Before falling asleep, his mind opens like a kaleidoscope, memory and dream-scape merging to show him one, strange reel of truth and impossibility. A fist making a violent arc in the air, the purpling of a bruise across his ribs, Mark’s body illuminated under the high-beams of a headlight, rain drenched shoulders, a spherical cube of ice clinking lazily against the whiskey-glass, a stripe of blood trailing towards a body opened like an over-ripe tomato on the concrete, the sand of an hourglass flowing backwards, the back of Taeyong’s neck curving downwards as if in gratitude, as if in prayer or exaltation; No, he’s gouging his eyes out.

~~

               

                “If we get a bunch of orders for pina-coladas during happy hour today, I’m going to fucking lose it.” Yuta said, struggling under the weight of two over-full grocery bags. Taeyong was beside him, struggling equally as much, if not more. Their bags were full of pineapples and heavy cans of coconut crème. They had even bought some extra boxes of rainbow paper-umbrellas to use as decoration for the cocktails.

                “Yes, yesterday was a drag.” Taeyong agreed mildly. The night before, for whatever reason, had been full of newly-legal kids who wanted to booze it up without actually having to taste booze. Their tickets had been full of orders for overly sugared, ridiculously colored fruity drinks; the kind with umbrellas and candied fruits and sprinkles as garnish. And of course, as syrup and sugar and booze will do; quite a few patrons got sick; one even throwing up all over the bar counter before promptly falling asleep.

                “I vote that we go through a major spring-cleaning of our cocktail list. No more of those annoying to make blended-ice drinks, no more cocktails that call for chocolate shavings or candy or gummies. Only the refined stuff or basic stuff. Only G&T’s, Old fashions, Moscow mules. Shit like that.” Yuta said, the fronds of one of the pineapples poking him on the neck.

                “So what I’m getting from this conversation is that you’re lazy. And you don’t want college kids to come to our bar anymore.” Taeyong said, adjusting the bags to fit in the crook of his elbow more comfortably.

                “Precisely so!” Yuta said shamelessly, earning a small chuckle from Taeyong. “Speaking of drunkards, I don’t see that Jaehyun kid around anymore. The whiskey boy.”

                Taeyong looked down towards his feet as they walked to work with their groceries. It had been about two weeks since he and Jaehyun had very nearly kissed. It had been hot and humid, it had felt like any other tipsy summer night. But then the next morning, the air mattress had been folded, and Jaehyun was gone leaving nothing but a note that said “Thank you” and his spare set of keys. It had hit Mark harder than Taeyong expected it to. He had a strange look of betrayal on his face as he looked at Jaehyun’s non-goodbye goodbye letter, and then he left to school without eating breakfast. Taeyong himself, had found himself strangely wistful. It wasn’t just that they had shared a moment of unexpected and unfulfilled intimacy the night before. Taeyong had been intimate plenty of times and with plenty of people. This was different merely for how organic it felt. How right and easy. As if Jaehyun was a presence that had always been there, and would continue to be. Right until he wasn’t.

                Taeyong always knew it was not going to last. Jaehyun was going to one day _die_ because of him. He’d only let him stay because of his injuries, that at a certain point became excuses. Jaehyun had been well enough to leave for a long time and had continued living with them just because he wanted to. Taeyong knew this and had said nothing because he was happy to have him, and more importantly, Mark was too. But eventually, Taeyong would have had to tell Jaehyun to get out. For his own safety. Perhaps it was all for the best that Jaehyun had spared him the hard task of kicking him out. At least this way, Taeyong was the one who was hurt instead of causing hurt.

                “I haven’t really contacted him since he left us. I hope he’s well.” Taeyong said, his tone more clipped than he meant it. Yuta gave him a knowing look. His best friend and bar-hand was practically clairvoyant when it came to him. He could read Taeyong as if he came with a manual. He knew that when his voice was this carefully nonchalant, something was bothering him.

                “If you’re so resentful about him not reaching out maybe you sh— What’s going on here?” Yuta said, his tone alarmed. Taeyong also looked up from the pavement and saw that they were nearing a huge mob of people muttering in horror, all of their face turned up towards the sky. Blue and red lights were flashing from parked police cars, and an officer was getting out of the passenger’s seat with a megaphone. His face was slicked with sweat.

                “Excuse me, what’s going on?” asked a woman milling by. She didn’t respond with words, instead she pointed up towards the top of the adjacent school-yard. This was Mark’s high school, and there was a young woman standing at the top of the tallest building. No, it wasn’t a woman. It was a student, he could tell by the uniform. Taeyong remembered Mark as he left this morning, talking around a piece of bread.

                _Yeah, the college entrance exam results are out today. The teachers are on high alert because apparently there is always at least one suicide attempt each year_ _amongst students who don’t make the cut_. _Expect to get a flier in the mail soon from my school about signs to watch out for in depressed or suicidal teens._

                And there she was, that statistical one-percent of students that attempted to kill themselves when the examination results were out, blue as dusk in that vaguely sailor-esque school uniform. But the school staff had been ill-prepared. School was still in session, and they didn’t expect anyone to attempt anything on the school grounds while classes were still being conducted. The building she stood on the ledge of was tall. Definitely tall enough to kill her, but not tall enough that Taeyong could not see her face. Tear streaked. Desperate. This was the face of someone who believed their life was already ended, when it was not. A million and one other options for her besides college that could lead her to happiness, a million and one other options that she could not see.

                “My fucking god!” Yuta gasped, his arms slackening around the grocery bag until he finally dropped it, sending pineapples and dented cans of coconut crème rolling across the floor. “Don’t jump. No, no, oh no.” Yuta whispered to himself, his face an unhusked show of horror.

                The student stepped up onto the ledge, looking down, her black hair frantic all around her face like wind-whipped vines. Below, everyone was in chaos. The sirens pulsed. Some officers were speaking into their headsets about bringing in reinforcements with nets, and others shouted into their megaphones towards the girl directly, their voices filling the air like a god’s.

                **Do not jump. Young lady, it’s not worth it. Come down from the ledge. It will be okay. We’ve called your parents. DO NOT JUMP.**

                The onlookers squalled, not wanting to see the possible outcome, but also not able to tear themselves away. Taeyong could practically feel them wanting to run, but being frozen to the spot instead. Without realizing what he was doing, his feet were carrying him forward. At some point, he had also dropped his bag of groceries, but he wasn’t sure at what point. All he knew was that somehow, unexpectedly, he was caught in a nightmare. A young student’s nightmare. He imaged what she must be seeing up there on the ledge, staring at the mule-eyed ogles of the onlookers, listening to the sirens and the megaphone blaring into one monotonous, indecipherable roar. Taeyong imagined what she must be feeling in this moment, how she’s fooled herself into thinking her future is hopeless and its better this way… better this way. All the onlookers just watching because they want to see it happen, want to be entertained… want to—

                “Taeyong, what are you doing?” Yuta had grabbed his arm, and was pulled at him. Without realizing, Taeyong had walked to the very limits of where the police were allowing onlookers to gather. If she jumped right now, she would land close enough for Taeyong to reach out and touch.  “I don’t want to be here man. Let’s go. I can’t watch this, lets just go.”

                The crowd all around them began to collectively gasp. A young police officer had gone to the top of the building, and was now slowly inching his way towards the girl, saying something that no one could hear. This officer was young, his eyes optimistic and self-assured in a way that only someone new to the job could be. His palms were up in a display of surrender, as if to show that he meant no harm and wanted only to help. Benevolence was practically radiating off his body language.

                “He’s going to bring her down.” A random onlooker said hopefully.

                The young student had turned to face the young officer who was talking to her, and they could see that she was speaking back to him; though of course they could hear nothing. The officer inched closer to her all the while. She had not stepped off the ledge, but at least she was talking, and that was something. It felt like progress.

                As if to lessen the stress of the moment, the crowd communally went silent, the murmering dying down. The police officers down on the ground, stalled their cars and turned off the blaring sirens. There was perfect, obscure silence. Even Yuta who had been so desperate to get away from this scene had turned to watch the student and the police officer standing precariously on the ledge of the tall building. If the situation was a tightly coiled spring, it seemed to slacken ever so slightly. Relief was beginning to breeze through the crowd.

                “She’s not going to make it.” Taeyong said quietly, so low that only Yuta could hear.

                “What?” His friend turned towards him but Taeyong could not bear to look at him. He couldn’t bear to look at Yuta. Not now.

                “She’s not going to make it.” Taeyong said, his voice beginning to tremble, taking on the hard edge of a panic attack.

                And Taeyong was so sure of it. He was so sure of his words because above the girls head was red lettering that read: **Suicide.** And it was pounding. Pounding. _Pounding._ Her red lettering was pulsing like a living thing. A _dying_ thing. It thrashed like a sparrow, mangled from falling. It quivered like a speared fish. Her red lettering squirmed like it was dying because it’s owner soon would be. Stupid, stupid. Taeyong had noticed that some people’s red lettering was beginning to change form, and he’d wondered what it meant. Of course it meant this. How could he not have realized it before.

                _You’re powers are progressing, young human. I pity you._ He heard the reaper’s voice in his memory.

                Oh god.

                “She’s not going to make it.” He repeated a third time, breathless.

                He sensed the moment things started to go wrong. The young officer’s optimistic smile faltered, and his body took on a tensed urgency. The girl was turning away from him, she was looking back down towards the ground, the ledge crumbling little pebbles of concrete under her feet. She spread her arms out to her sides as if she meant to take flight. Yuta’s grip tightened on Taeyong’s arm, cutting off circulation. All around them, everyone began to scream, all at once, an animal sound of horror. Only some onlookers had the mental faculties to cover their eyes, but others were wide eyes and paralyzed, watching what they didn’t want to. Somewhere, someone was praying and praying until it pitched up into a wordless, hysterical cry.

                The girl fell forward just as the young officer tried to wrap his arms around her waist to pull her back, but his arms closed around air because she’d already fallen. Taeyong could see his shattered expression, his lips screaming _OH MY GOD OH MY GOD_ soundlessly into the wind.

                She hit the floor.

                It was a terrible, wet sound. A surprising amount of blood expelled, and Taeyong was close enough for some of it to get on the whites of his shoes. She fell head first and was dead instantly, but her muscles were still twitching, forcing her already expired body to pedal a little bit on the ground as if trying to run lying down.

                Everyone collectively broke.

                Distantly, Taeyong was aware that everyone was scattering, running. He was getting jostled this way and that by people scrambling to get away from this body that had broken like a plum on the dusty school-yard. Dry sobbing was filling the air along with screeching police sirens. People were screaming, hysterical, crying. At least a few people were throwing up. Taeyong was doing none of these things. He was just looking at the ruins of the young girl’s body: the red lettering where her caved head was slowly getting coated by settling dust. Though she was most definitely dead, the synapses of her body must have still been firing because the lettering was not gone yet. It was not pulsing as hard as before, but it flexed and waned like a candle blowing out. _Suicide. Suicide._

And then it flickered out. She was just a vessel emptied of everything that was.

                “Taeyong. Taeyong, lets go. Taeyong, come on please.” Yuta’s voice was strange. Taeyong wasn’t sure he’d ever heard his best friend crying before, but he definitely was now.

                His body felt strange and cottoned, blunted at the edges. His heard was beginning to palpitate in a rhythym he could not recognize. He was scared, terrified.

                _Oh god, I’m going to panic._

Taeyong had fallen to his knees, but Yuta was dragging him up. Taeyong looked up towards his friend’s haunted face. His red lettering was pulsating so hard. It was pulsating so much harder than everyone elses, almost as hard as this dead girl’s had been before she’d jumped.

                **Stab. Wounds.**

 He hasn’t screamed at all through all of this, but abruptly, he can’t control it. He buckles in Yuta’s arms, hardly able to believe that animal sound is coming from his own mouth. The panic rises red in Taeyong’s throat.

                He succumbs.


	15. Reaper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow... I abandoned this story for so long. I'm sorry T_T I'm the worst. Truth is, my life has been super crazy the past few months, and quite frankly, it made me lose motivation, not only for this story, but lots of other things. But I hate leaving things unfinished, so I'm going to try to get into this story again. I'm sorry if this chapter is a little shite, I'm easing back into the tempo. Thank you for your patience and support <3 <3

~~

                Blood had gotten on his shoes. Of all things, this was what Taeyong’s attention zoomed in on as his surroundings devolved into a crush of sirens. He felt as if he had been submerged underwater, oceanic pressure causing his ears to pop and become murky; everything heard through a sieve. Voices and police sirens and distant sobbing all snagging together into an indistinct mesh. Blood was on his shoes. Blood was on his shoes.

                Somewhere, a girl had plunged off the rooftop of a building, abruptly curtailing her little life. And blood was on his shoes.

                Distantly, he was aware that he was being jostled this way and that by other human bodies, some surging ahead of him to get a closer look at the carnage, and others stumbling past him in haste to get away. In his panic, he had grown roots. His body was paralyzed even as his mind pulsed in desperation to run away. He felt like he was drowning, his heart quickening in response to his lack of oxygen. He’d forgotten how to breathe.

                His white shoes spackled with cerise. It was darker than any blood he had seen. It would likely never come off. Not ever. Oh God. Someone had died in front of his eyes. He’d watched her plunge forward and break her head on the dusty black-top, so close he’d felt the ground murmur at her impact. Taeyong had been stalked by death all his life, but never had he been forced to witness it. And now his mind was racing, showing him a movie reel of what would inevitably become reality: Mark walking home on a rainy night, a driver losing control, skidding on slick pavement, an awful, bone-crushing impact, blood draining into a gutter as the ambulances wail. Yuta closing shop after a busy night at work and a masked man rushing him in an alley, his blade trailing a jagged smile in his abdomen. The myriad of small decisions that could lead his loved ones to a pre-destined death. No, no, no

                Taeyong’s breath was coming out jagged and desperate, and the world seemed to flex and converge. He rooted around in his pocket for his klonopin, cursing himself for leaving them in his desk-side drawer. He was losing it.

                “Taeyong, what the fuck are you doing. Let’s go, come on!” Yuta was tugging on his arm rather violently, his voice lush with tears.

                But Taeyong could not come on, his heart was beating too quickly.

                News of what had happened had spread quickly enough that students were beginning to stream out of their classes. Despite the faculty’s attempts to keep them away from the scene, they milled about, murmuring their horror and peeking glances at the body. Taeyong’s vision was darkening at the edges, nothing seemed real.

                “Hyung!” The voice cut like a knife through the clamor.

                Mark was weaving through the crowd towards them. His school uniform was still pristinely pressed as they were that morning, and in his hand, he was absently grasping a pen as if he’d rushed away from his desk without even time to put it down. His eyes were a little haunted, a little horrified, but he was keeping it together. He was careful not to look in the direction of where the paramedics were dropping a stretcher beside the suicide.

                “Mark! Something’s wrong with your brother.” Yuta said, and Mark was replying in a calm manner possible only through experience: “He’s having a panic attack” but Taeyong could barely pay attention to them. The girl was being lifted up, heavily rolled onto the stretcher by the EMT. A loud keening rose amongst the spectators at the sight. Her face was just… gone. An organic mass of tissue and bone framed by luscious brown hair, the suggestion of a girl. She couldn’t have wanted this. Taeyong was sure if she’d known what she’d leave behind of herself, she would have chosen another way. Perhaps she’d been taken with the romantic vision of death by falling, arms outstretched, the confluence of flight and plummet. But she’d left behind nothing for her parents to say goodbye to, at least nothing they would recognize.

                “Hyung, come on. School is cancelled, let’s go home. We have to get you home.” Mark was saying, his voice gentle, too gentle as if coaxing a frightened animal out of a box.

                The paramedics worked quickly, covering her body with a sheet that soaked red almost immediately. They loaded her onto the back of the ambulance, not bothering to turn on their sirens because there was not urgency here, she was irrefutably dead. They reversed, and then turned down the school driveway, as quiet as a hearse. And just like that, she was gone, just an imprint of red left behind where she fell. People began to disperse, some shaking, and others disturbingly unrattled. And then Taeyong saw him: Hansol standing like an apparition where the girl’s body had just been a moment ago. But he wasn’t an apparition. He was suddenly real, flesh and bone, tangible enough for the wind to toss his black hair back and forth. Had he always been standing there, just so? Or had he just… appeared? This was the first time Taeyong had ever seen Hansol outside of a dream, and it terrified him. The most constant subject of his nightmares had suddenly become real enough to touch.

                Hansol’s expression was stoic, even as he stood in the middle of a parabola of blood. He had the countenance of someone who had just completed a tedious day at work, and Taeyong knew he had taken her. not her physical body, but her life, her soul. And even so, his face betrayed no sadness, and no cruelty. Death wasn’t cruel, it was only obedient.

                The reaper’s eyes flickered up, and met Taeyong’s across the school yard. For one breathless moment, they mistook one another for their own reflection.  

 

~~

                Jaehyun received the call in a deserted public bathroom, the kind no one ever really used because the facilities were so old. There was only one toilet, and the rest were squatters: deep holes in the ground that people ran the risk of falling into.

                “Crap.” Jaehyun muttered to himself. The phone’s vibration in his pocket startled him into a cut on his jawline. He submerged his razer into the soapy sink water and watched a thin tendril of blood rise from the blade.

                Wiping his face clean with his shirt, he looked down at his phone, fully expecting it to be Ten (as it almost always was), but no. He did a double-take at the name on his beat-up little Nokia screen. **Crazy Bartender.** Taeyong.

                They hadn’t spoken since Jaehyun had just left them without a proper goodbye, and that was more than two weeks ago, almost three now. But that last night still kept Jaehyun up sometimes, the strange magic that had compelled him to nearly kiss Taeyong. He couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t blundered like that, if he hadn’t done anything to chase the famously skittery Taeyong away. Perhaps they would have kept up the routine of playing house, or maybe Jaehyun would have left regardless once he healed. But at the very least, Jaehyun wouldn’t feel the need to avoid him like he did now.

                His hand quivered a little as he opened the flip-phone’s screen, his heart is racing like a school-girl’s and he didn’t know why.

                “Hello?” He managed to keep his voice steady.

                “Hyung?”

                This threw him aback. He knew for a fact that Taeyong was older than him. Confused, he checked the screen one more time to make sure it was indeed Taeyong calling, and yes, his name was on the screen.

                “Hello?” Jaehyun said again, bewildered.

                “Jaehyun hyung? It’s me. Uh, I know we haven’t spoken since you left. I’m sorry for calling so suddenly.” He didn’t need a name to know It was Mark. His voice sounded uncertain and sorry and scared, which for a kid as brave as Mark, was very alarming.

                “What’s wrong?” Jaehyun asked, turning off the sink and letting the water drain. The little shorn hairs kicked up a vortex in the water.

                “It’s my brother.” He said, and Jaehyun’s heart hit the floor.

                “What happened?”

                And so he listened as Mark launched into a horrible story about sitting in class, drowsing as he waits for his peers to finish their tests, glancing out the window and seeing a girl in the distance pitch herself off the highest building, the school falling into chaos as news spreads, everything canceled, the classes and tests pushed back, the scene of the suicide, the way the air seemed to smell like iron as the dead girl was carted away as swift as safety. When he finally got to the part about Taeyong, Jaehyun was already hastily packing up his things into the duffel bag, the phone held between his ear and his shoulder. Taeyong and been with the bar-back Yuta on their way to work, and they had witnessed the whole thing. Taeyong had been close enough to the fall to actually be splattered with gore, and he had had a panic attack, but refused to go to the hospital. It had taken all of Mark and Yuta’s strength and coaxing to get Taeyong home in his state, and Yuta abruptly had to leave to open up the bar in Taeyong’s stead.

                “And he’s locked himself in the bathroom and won’t come out. He’s been in there for two hours now, and he won’t answer me when I talk to him, and I’m just really scared and I don’t know what to do, and I’m sorry, but can you please come? I just don’t know—” Mark’s words were tumbling out in a single stream of speech, unpunctuated by breath. He sounded desperate, which was uncharacteristic and worrying.

                “Yes.” Jaehyun interrupted, and all he could hear was Mark’s slightly hastened breathing on the other side. “Yes. I’m coming. I’ll go right now. I’ll be there in twenty.”

                Another extended silence, and finally he heard Mark mutter a small “okay.”

                He hung up, slipping his phone in his pocket and taking off for the Lee house at a sprint. He knew the way by muscle memory. The bus would be easier, but his own two feet would get him there faster if he cut through the back alleys. And as his lungs burned and his chest heaved raggedly under the mid-day swelter, he realized with strange sweetness that of all the people Mark could have trusted to ask for help, he had chosen Jaehyun. He had chosen him.  All around him, the cicadas took up their songs, singing loud enough to overtake even the distant traffic.

~~


	16. The Living and the Dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a little bittersweet to write about Hansol in this story since it's pretty widely speculated he's no longer in NCT :,(

 

Chapter 15

 

~~

 

                From the bathroom, Mark could hear nothing but the steady thrum of the shower and the sink running simultaneously. When he and Yuta had managed to get Taeyong home, his older brother had sprinted into the bathroom immediately and locked the door behind him. For about twenty minutes, Mark could hear horrible, empty retching; the kind made painful by an empty stomach, nothing to relinquish but stomach acid. And then, after a perfunctory flushing of the toilet to empty whatever he had tried and failed to throw up, silence.

                Mark didn’t think silence could be worse than the sound of heaving, but it was.

                He’d tried to knock on the door, even going so far as to jiggle the handle and slam his shoulder against the wood, but his brother wasn’t so much as responding. It was all terribly familiar.

                His brother had panic disorder and anxiety since he was younger, but with age (and certainly with medication), he had recovered somewhat. The panic attacks that used to come almost daily in his childhood now only happened maybe monthly, and much less severely. Today however, felt different. It had been a long time since Mark had seen Taeyong so rattled he was shaking, hardly even able to choke out a complete sentence. And for some reason, he was unable to look Yuta in the face, flinching as if something was hurting his eyes whenever he tried. It had been clear to everyone that, for whatever reason, Yuta’s presence was making Taeyong’s anxiety worse. So he’d left to go to work in Taeyong’s place, looking hurt and confused and quite scared.

                “Hyung, please open the door.” Mark said, leaning his forehead against the door frame. He felt a little sick himself, his mind hadn’t quite wrapped around the fact that he had just witnessed a peer die. A peer who, just days ago, had let him borrow a pen that he had forgotten to return and was still sitting in his school desk now. His knuckles were quivering as he knocked on the door again. “Come one, please.”

                Silence. Just water pounding the tiles. Best case scenario, Taeyong was just in shock, crouched on the ground. But Mark was afraid he’d done something drastic. His mind jumped to the worst possible scenario: all the pill bottles in the cabinet opened and emptied, the water beating him. Mark was being paranoid, he knew. Still, he was afraid.

                Mark slid to the floor, propping himself up against the frame, cradling his head on his knees. He couldn’t believe this was happening. It all felt surreal, like the suggestion of reality, just slightly uncanny. Yuta had said something off too, before he left to open the bar:

                _Your brother knew. I don’t know how, but he knew she was going to die._

Mark pulled the hair out of his bangs, the memory of the girl falling playing repeatedly in his head like a skipping record. Mark was marveled by the fragility of a human life: how quickly it could unravel. Just last week, he’d seen her joking around with her friends about  new boyfriend, fawning about some celebrity during break time. Now she was irrevocably gone. He imagined her in an alternate timeline, getting up to the top of the building and looking over the awning, realizing the finality of her decision, seeing the concern on the faces of the people below. He imagined her stepping away from the ledge, coming back down, deciding to live. It could have easily happened, but she’d chosen the path that was no path at all.

                _He knew she was going to die._

At face value, this statement was not strange at all. It was only odd when placed against its particulars: Yuta said that Taeyong had made this comment when everyone else believed she was going to be saved. An officer had gone to the top of the building and was talking her down. She had been listening, had even taken a single step away from the ledge, everyone on the ground believed they had convinced her not to jump.

                _He said she’s not going to make it._

And then she’d let herself fall. How did Taeyong know? Was it just his tendency to always expect the worst, or something else? Mark felt like something was hovering just past the realm of the natural, the explainable. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore, expect that it felt like they were all stuck in some web that was drawing them fast towards some calamity, and there was nothing he could do to slow it down.

                The doorbell jerked Mark out of his thoughts. Jaehyun was here.

                Breathing a sigh of relief, he ran to the front door, pulling it open. Jaehyun was leaning against the frame, doubled over from the effort of sprinting, his bangs plastered all over his forehead by sweat. In the few weeks since he’d left their home, he’d grown thinner, the tired bags underneath his eyes more prominent. Even so, Mark was overwhelmed by gratitude to see him.

                “Where is he?” Jaehyun asked without preamble, as forward and industrious as ever.

                “In the bathroom. He’s almost been in there for an hour now, and he won’t answer me.

                The two of them walked into the home, and despite the situation, Jaehyun was overcome by a sense of nostalgia at the familiar surroundings, the clutter, the herbaceous, fresh scent that was so distinctly Taeyong. It made him ache.

                Despite knowing the bathroom door was locked, he jostled the handle anyways.

                “Taeyong, it’s Jae. Open the door.” He called. No one answered, all he could hear was the faucet.

                “He’s been unresponsive for a long time.” Mark said, worry etched over his face, making him appear much older than he was. What a disaster their young lives were. How tired and lonesome.

                “I’m giving you one minute to unlock this door before I pick the lock and force my way in.” Jaehyun said, to still more silence. He waited, it felt like the right thing to do to at least give Taeyong an option in this moment.

                “You know how to do that?” Mark asked, his eyebrows raised.

                It was a newly acquired skill Jaehyun had picked up while breaking into foreclosed houses to sleep, but he felt like it would be better to not tell Mark this. He just shrugged, watching the time on his windup watch click towards a minute.

                Time was up, whether Taeyong wanted to see him or not, he was about to.

                He pulled out the sliver of stiff steel from his wallet, a self-fashioned lock picker that he’d found outside of a metal shop a few weeks prior. He knelt in front of the door, inserting the thin metal rod into the hole, using the curved tip to leverage up the pins high enough for him to turn the barrel of the lock. It was quick work, and the door clicked open with a creak. Abruptly, he was hit with a cloud of hot steam, the water pouring from the shower must have been scalding.

                “Why don’t you wait in the living room? He’ll probably be hungry, can you whip up something for him to eat? Porridge or something?” Jaehyun said. Whatever state Taeyong was in behind these doors, it would probably not be something he would want his little brother to see.           

Mark nodded, his eyes wide at the steam funneling out of the cracked door, before blundering away to the kitchen. When the first sounds of pots and pans clamoring rang out, Jaehyun slipped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

~~

 

Once, what felt like a million years ago, Jaehyun and his first love had snuck out of their cabins at church camp and met down in the fields where the grasses rose above their waists. The world was vibrant with wildflowers, camellias singing their spring-time pinks and purples. This was before they had been caught by their peers and turned over to their fathers, before Jaehyun was beaten methodically by his father in front of everyone.

The two of them couldn’t have known that things were swiftly coming to an end for them, but somehow they could feel it.

“My father, if he finds out about this,” Jungkook had said, pointing his finger at Jaehyun and then at himself “will kill us both.”

His eyes were afraid. He wrapped his arms around his stomach as if to cradle himself to comfort. He had fallen in love, and was guilty for it. His father had always dreamed of him marrying a nice, church-going woman, or at least living a holy, single life devoted to only his lord. It scared him to know that he would likely not live any of those lives his father hoped for him. Jungkook let his knees slowly fail. He disappeared under the canopy of wild grasses and let it stich shut over him. From Jaehyun’s standing position over the waist-high foliage, it abruptly looked like he was alone. All around, the rustle of the swaying, browned brush sounded like it was raining.

And then it was.

The spring rain came as unbeckoned and sudden as falling in love, the intensity of the rain pounding the grasses flatter and flatter until it revealed Jungkook sitting hunched on the soil just letting it all drench him.

Jaehyun couldn’t help but be reminded of this as he stood on the flooded floor of the bathroom, steam and heat obscuring his vision. The shower was running scalding water, and the sink was overflowing onto the tiles. And Taeyong.

He was sitting like a folded piece of paper against the wall, his clothes sopping wet from the flooded floor, but doing nothing to mitigate it. His eyes held the same distraught distance his first love’s had all those years ago. Why was it that Jaehyun could only witness misery of the ones he loved, only to realize that misery is also a wall. Taeyong looked impenetrable, sitting as he was in an inch of steaming water, his eyes not really registering anything.

Jaehyun knelt down, ducking his head so he was eyelevel with Taeyong. From this vantage point, he could see the blood splatter on his pant legs and shoes.

“Snap out of it.” He said, his voice a bit harsher than he intended. Jaehyun was prickly and self protective by nature. He didn’t do well with tenderness, but he thought of everything Taeyong had done for him, cleared his throat and tried again.

“Taeyong.”

The boy’s eyes fluttered and met his for a fraction of a second before losing focus again.

“Hey, come on. How long are you planning on sitting here for?”

No response.

“You’re really scaring Mark, you know.”

A moment of stillness, and then Taeyong slowly shook his head a little, mouthing what looked like might have been _I’m sorry_ or _I know._

Jaehyun sighed, feeling woozy from the heat, but he didn’t want to leave Taeyong even for a second to turn the water off.

“Taeyong.” He said quietly, placing a tentative hand on the other boy’s knee. “It’s time to get up.”

He leaned in, intending to prop his hand underneath his elbow to prop him up, and then he saw with surprise that Taeyong was not sitting still like he’d initially thought. Hidden behind his propped knees, his fingers were scrabbling with frenetic energy, each hand digging excavation sites into the opposite forearm. Jaehyun gasped, he couldn’t help it. Taeyong’s white shirt was spattered with water-diluted blood. Nail marks ran from his wrists to up near his elbows, a shocking, animalistic patternlessness. Just seeing it was enough to make everything smell of iron.

“Jesus! Tae!” Jaehyun murmered, grabbing him firmly by either wrist and forcing it away from further violence. He could see flesh embedded under each nail. It occurred to him with an odd mix of relief and unease that this was not an act of intentional self-harm, but rather, a nervous tick. Something unconscious and habitual. Jaehyun remembered how Taeyong sometimes wore long sleeves even in the most sweltering of summer nights, and it all abruptly made sense.

“Yuta…” Taeyong muttered suddenly, his voice strangely gravelly.

“What? I’m not Yuta.” He said, bewildered, but Taeyong just shook his head.

“No, I mean Yuta… He’s not…”

“He’s not what? What about him?”

Taeyong opened and closed his mouth, as if he desperately wanted to say something but had lost the capacity for speech. After a few moments or gasping around words, he groaned, putting his head on his knees and pounded the tiles his fist as if in unbelievable frustration.

“Okay, enough of that. Come on.” Jaehyun said, deciding abruptly that perhaps the gentle approach was not something he was good at. “Up you go, come on.”

He stood and pulled Taeyong onto his feet. The other boy yielded very little, or perhaps he was just that weightless. Taeyong needed to snap out of it. Without any concrete plan, Jaehyun pulled them both underneath the showerhead. Fully clothed, the hot water drenched them both. It burned enough to be pleasurable.

“Look what you’ve done.” Jaehyun said without any real reprimand. He took Taeyong’s hand, holding it under the hot stream until the blood and skin in his nailbeds washed away. “Look what you’ve fucking done.”

He brushed a gentle hand over the devastated flesh of his forearms, watching the water rinse the blood clean until the ravines of where he had torn into it was clearly visible. These would definitely scar. It looked painful, made Jaehyun want to whimper just looking at it, but Taeyong was as stoic as stone.

How strange it was how hard the world seemed to conspire to throw them together. A few weeks ago, Jaehyun had resigned himself to never seeing Taeyong again. And yet—

He felt a heavy weight on his left shoulder, and it took him a few long moments to register that Taeyong was leaning his forehead against it, breathing steadily. And then slowly, tiredly, he pressed more and more of his weight on him until their forms were pressed flush against each other. Jaehyun could feel exhaustion radiating off his body, the way he relinquished all of his weight onto him.

So trusting.

He placed a bracing palm flat against Taeyong’s back, anchoring him in place. They stood like that together until the water that canvased them turned cool, and then turned cold.

 

~~

 

When he was not working, which was seldom, death took special pleasure in observing the myriad of ways in which mankind portrayed him. The most popular rendition of himself was the tall, faceless robed figure carrying a scythe, perhaps with a skeletal hand poking through a frayed sleeve. On Halloween, humans masqueraded in such outfits with masks splashed with fake blood. Other times, he was signified simply with a skull and two crossed femurs underneath. Other times, he was the devil, goat horns and all. This was perhaps the most inaccurate depiction of all. He was not evil. He was not good, but he was not evil. He was only industrious.

All of these depictions of death, of course, were wrong. Most all humans met death many times in their lives without even realizing it.

Hansol looked down at himself, his prosaic cotton clothing, the silver rings adorning his fingers, his well-kept loafers. By all standards, he looked like a man. A handsome one at that. And he knew that right this moment, there were millions of other entities just like him roaming the earth, blending in, doing their jobs by which he meant overseeing death and all its particulars.

“How’s the drink?” The bartender asked him, topping up his water.

Hansol nodded in approval. It really was quite good, a simple whiskey high-ball made special by the fact that the bartender had grated in fresh orange zest.

“I’m Yuta, by the way. I don’t recognize you, this must be your first time here.”

Hansol reached over to shake his hand. He already knew his name, but he didn’t say so. He also knew that he had maybe two weeks tops in this life, but he didn’t say that either.

“I go way back with the head bartender here.” He said evenly, watching the red lettering pulse like an alarm over Yuta’s head.  The last thrashing of a life winding down to an end.  


	17. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow it's been so long, sorry for being so spotty with updating T_T Everytime I abandon a story, it gets harder and harder to start it back up again in any decent way. This chapter might be a little shite since I've been away for so long, but thank you for your patience :) my goal is to finish this story haha, so though I may not be regular with updates, I will definitely keep going ^^

~

 

Chapter 16

~

 

                In Mark’s young life, he’d bore witness to more trauma than was probably strictly fair, but even for him, today felt a little cruel. In his head, he could still see his classmate falling off the top of that edifice, breaking open like an over-ripe fruit on the dusty schoolyard. Again and again and again like a skipping cassette tape. So much water, the human body contained. So easily snuffed out a human life. If he’d believed in God at all, he may have started to resent him, but Mark believed in nothing but mankind and all its myriad vulnerabilities and sorrows. And so, after about a half hour of nervous pacing around the kitchen he heard the lock of the bathroom door click open, his nailbeds were already bitten to blood-mulch.

                Jaehyun emerged from the bathroom, holding up Taeyong who looked just about on the verge of collapse. Both of them drenched and shivering. Water ringed a vast expanse on the carpet directly outside of their bathroom.

                Now they were all sitting at the dining room table, the heat cranked on despite summer. Mark had hastened to boil some barley tea, and had quickly set to bandaging Taeyong’s arms.

                Mark sighed, looking down at his brother’s torn forearms. When they were growing up, Taeyong’s nervousness often manifested in unintentional but horrid physical injury. But he’d slowly recovered, it hardly happened anymore. Mark couldn’t remember the last time Taeyong had clawed his own skin to tatters, but he supposed given everything they’d witnessed today, Mark couldn’t blame him. He plunged the cloth into the blood-pinked hot water, squeezing and dabbing it gently on his brothers arms. Taeyong didn’t so much as flinch. He didn’t do anything really, which scared Mark more than anything. As sick as it was, he would rather hear his brother grunting in pain than remaining catatonically silent. He pressed the rag down harder, drawing new blood up from the raw meat of his arm. Taeyong did not react. Mark did not relent, using the hardness of the pads of his finger to press the cloth down cruelly on his ruined skin. The rag that had only been diluted pink began to stain bright red again.

                _React, damn you._ Mark’s head insisted with a fervor very much unlike himself. He felt a very frayed thread in his head threatening to unravel.

                Jaehyun watched for a bit, wide eyed with confusion. “Mark, hey. Kid, be gentle.”

                But no, for some reason Mark could not be gentle. Though most every fiber of his being was made of light and kindness, though he loved Taeyong more than he loved his own life, right now a weathered part of him he’d never knew existed was rising up. He could not control it. In his head he could hear Yuta again, declaring: _Your brother knew she wasn’t going to make it. He knew she was going to die._

                The cloth slipped from his grip, and now his hand was clamped directly on Taeyong’s clawed at wrist. The slick of his brother’s blood coating his palm made Mark want to hurl, but he squeezed harder. He wanted his brother to say something, to come out of his shock-induced stupor. To pull away. To hit him.

                _Where are you, hyung?_

“Mark, let go of your brother!” Jaehyun demanded, but he seemed a little at a loss of what to do. He didn’t pull them apart, merely placed a hand on Mark’s tense shoulders. There was the distinct feeling here that he was witnessing something deeply private.

                _You’re right here, but you’re not. Hyung, where are you?_

Taeyong’s eyes were still out of focus and staring faraway. His tea on the table was untouched and rapidly cooling. Yuta had said his brother had known. He’d predicted that the girl would jump. And she did. Why did Mark have the feeling that this was not a fluke? That there was more to all of this than he could comprehend?

                Hardly knowing what he was doing, he dug into his brother’s wound with the nail of his thumb. The soft, open flesh there hot and yielding and bleeding again.

                _What are you hiding from me?_

“Mark!”

                Mark leaned forward, wanting to inspect his brother’s dead-pan gaze a little closer. The lines of his face were as immutable as a pond. And then abruptly, it broke. Taeyong’s line of vision seemed to snap into focus at a point a little bit above Mark’s head. Mark realized he’d been savagelypushed only when he hit the ground, the chair he’d been sitting on clattering beside him. He gasped on his back, winded from landing hard. His hand was covered in Taeyong’s blood, the bandages he was going to use to dress the wounds forgotten on the table. Every part of his being felt frayed and frightened. Of circumstances, yes. But also of himself. And his brother. He was frightened of himself, and he was frightened of his brother. He couldn’t place when they’d begun hiding things from one another. Perhaps it had been this way forever, and he was only now realizing it.

                Taeyong looked down at him, finally out of his catatonic stupor. His fore-arms looked awful. Jaehyun was just standing, bewildered. His hair still wet and dripping. Mark sat up slowly. The linoleum floor where his hand touched came away with a bloody handprint.

                Taeyong was on his knees, breathing a litany of hurried apologies, reaching out to pull Mark up.

“Tell me.” Mark said fiercely, pushing away his brother’s comforting arms.

                Taeyong flinched back, regarding his younger brother. For a moment, he didn’t recognize him. “What?”

                “Tell me what you’re hiding.” Mark demanded, pulling himself up to his feet. His eyes were bleary with unshed tears. Even he didn’t understand this sudden rush of emotions, all this anger and sadness and inexplicable fear. But he was drowning in it. And he needed his brother to pull him from this river. “Tell me what you are keeping from me.”

                Taeyong took a step back as if physically rebuffed. His mouth opening and closing as if he wanted to speak. Wanted wanted wanted. But he couldn’t. He seemed to choke on his own intentions. He placed a hand over his own mouth like it didn’t belong to him. This alone, was enough for Mark to know his suspicions were not wrong.

                He rushed forward, grabbing the front of his brothers shirt, but this time without violence. He was imploring. Begging.

                “Let me help you. Hyung.” Mark said, his voice quavering. The inexplicable feeling that a noose was tightening around them all carving an animal fear into him. “Tell me what’s wrong, and I’ll help you. You don’t have to be alone.”

                But Taeyong couldn’t couldn’t speak. Had never been able to speak about his curse to anyone. Now was no exception, though everything in his being wanted to spill everything to his brother. To warn him about his fast approaching death. To tell Jaehyun to run away from him and never turn back. But the words caught in his throat.

                This was just how it was. He would always be alone.

                Taeyong wrapped his cold hands around his younger brother’s, untangling it from his shirt, and he pulled him into an embrace. All the fight went out of him at once. Mark was quaking, though if that was from anger or sadness, Taeyong wasn’t sure. All he knew was that some invisible fence had been thrown up between them. Mark was a smart kid. He knew a secret when he sensed one, and how he would go about trying to get the truth out of Taeyong was anyone’s guess. They were in dark waters.

                “I’m sorry baby brother.” Taeyong said softly, feeling Mark weaken in his arms. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but it was. An ending was coming quickly for them all, in one way or another. “You can’t help me.”

                Taeyong knew those words would crush Mark beyond anything else. The two of them had spent their entire lives pulling each other out of the river. But that water was simply too deep, too treacherous to wade out into now. Taeyong wouldn’t have his brother risk it.

                Muttering something about needing to go to work, Taeyong pulled his jacket over his still bloody arms and walked out into the evening leaving Mark and Jaehyun wounded and confused in the dining room, their feet drenched with spilled barley tea.

 

~

 

                Nothing surprised Taeyong anymore. When he arrived a few hours late to the bar and found the reaper sitting in one of the stools, he could hardly bring himself to react in any meaningful way. But there he was in his sleek black coat, drinking highballs as leisurely as a businessman on his day off.

                “Should we cut him off?” Yuta whispered to him as they polished wine glasses. “He’s been sitting here for like three hours. That’s like his sixth drink.”

                Taeyong looked behind him at Hansol who was just watching the television above with a cool disinterest. The news was bleating something about a serial killer who had been caught while attempting to flee the country. The screen showed a series of censored crime scene photos in a perfunctory manner before the news moved on to the weather forecast. Taeyong wondered what reapers like Hansol thought when confronted with such violence. Did they judge humans for how cruel they were to one another? Other animals on this earth only killed for survival. Only humans killed for fun, for lust, to prove a point. Did Reapers even care what all these short-lived beings did?

                “Let him be. If he seems like he’s getting too drunk, then we’ll send him out.” Taeyong said.

                “That’s the weird thing. The dude is as sober as a convent. Is that humanly possible after six whiskeys?” Yuta muttered, slicing lemons for the bar tray.

                “I have an impressive tolerance.” Hansol said, his deep voice carrying across the bar.

                “Ah fuck, you could hear us?” Yuta said with a sheepish smile.

                “I also have impressive hearing.” Hansol said, an empty smile hung on his face. It was the smile of someone who didn’t really know how to smile, and was imitating it and failing.

                Taeyong shot a glare at Hansol before pouring some whiskey and sour mix into his shaker, the ice cracking beneath the liquor. Closing it, he through it over to shake to a vigorous froth. The movement caused the fabric of his sleeve to snag on his ruined skin. He could smell his own blood.

                Pouring the whiskey-sour into a glass, he rang the bar bell so Doyoung could come scurrying to retrieve it.

                “So how do ya’ll know each other?” Yuta asked slowly, obviously noticing Taeyong’s dark cloud of annoyance at Hansol’s presence.

                “We’re childhood friends.” Hansol said, throwing back the rest of his drink and motioning Yuta for another. “Though I must admit, Taeyong liked me better back then.”

                Taeyong remembered when the reaper had first appeared to him in dreams when he was a kid. Back then, his powers had just emerged. He was lip locked and terrified. Hansol had been the only one he could talk to about his curse. Back then, he hadn’t even registered that Hansol may have not been human. All he knew was that someone was there holding his small body and rubbing comforting circles in his hair, telling him he was not crazy. Once, he’d taken comfort in his presence. Now though, he knew better.

                “Can’t imagine why.” Yuta said slowly. “You seem… lovely.”

                Hansol’s lips curled back in a more genuine smile at Yuta’s obvious lie. Even if humans didn’t realize what they were in the presence of, reapers always set them on edge. How could they not, they were death incarnate.

                Above Yuta’s head, his lettering was pulsing and blindingly bright, as if drawn by the force of the reaper sitting on the other side of the bar. Suddenly, Taeyong wanted nothing more than to separate the two.

                “Alright, I think seven drinks is quite enough. I don’t want us to be held liable if you go out and pass out somewhere. Pay up.” Taeyong said, slamming his palm on the bar.

                Hansol reached into his pocket, pulling out several bills. Where reapers got human money, Taeyong would never know.

                Hansol stood, pulling on his long black coat, looking both like a model and a mob boss. Why was the reaper eschewing dreams and coming to Taeyong in his real life? What had changed?

                “Taeyong.” Hansol said, the line of his mouth severe. “Mind your brother.”

                _Mind my brother? What the fuck does he…_

Before Taeyong could finish the thought, Hansol was halfway out the door.

                “Thanks, have a good evening—” Yuta called after him, and when the door shut behind them leaving their bar empty, Yuta continued in a low mutter “—ya creepy fuck.”

                “I’m not trying to judge your friendships Tae,” Yuta said, pouring a glass of beer for himself, the foam head creaming over the edges. He took a deep swig. “But that man gave me the heebie jeebies.”

                “We’re not friends anymore. I don’t even know why he would come here.” Taeyong said, scratching at his sleeve. Yuta’s eyes followed to where Taeyong was scratching and gasped.

                “Your arms!”

                Taeyong looked down, noticing for the first time that his sleeves were stained slightly brown with dried blood.

                “Are you hurt?” Yuta reached for him and Taeyong pulled back.

“I’m fine, it’s really nothing.” This concern, he couldn’t stand it. Not when objectively, Yuta should have only been afraid for his own life. His lettering was so bright, so insistent. How long did he have? His lettering looked so much like that girl’s did right before she plummeted to her death. It couldn’t be too far off.

Taeyong stared into his friend’s concerned face, trying to commit every feature to his memory. It seemed almost inconceivable that Yuta who was more alive than anyone he knew, would soon not be anymore. Taeyong could see the intensity of his gaze was making Yuta nervous. Their friendship was fun and jokey and comfortable. Yuta often didn’t know how to react when Taeyong went into his occasional emotive fits.

“So is this where we make out, or….”

Taeyong barked out a laugh, breaking his stare and moving away towards the fridge. He pulled a Heineken out and popped off the cap, relishing the cool effervescence of the beer as he drank. God, he was tired. Of everything. Yuta was smiling at him strangely, the look of someone trying to hide concern and confusion.

“Hey, Yuta. How long has it been since you’ve seen your family?” Taeyong asked.

Yuta plucked a drink ticket out of the printer and began to cut limes for the mojito order Johnny had just placed. He hummed deep in his throat.

“More than a year, definitely. Maybe close to a year and a half.” Yuta said. On the TV above them, the news was reporting a terrorist attack somewhere faraway in the world. People scattered all around. How many reapers were there plucking souls from bodies like little white flowers?

“Don’t you miss them?”

“What kind of question is that, of course I do. Wouldn’t you miss Mark if you couldn’t see him?”

Taeyong flinched. That time might be coming a lot sooner and with more permanence than Yuta meant.

“Especially my little sister man. I feel like I’m missing a lot of landmark moments. Like I didn’t get to see her entering high school. When we were younger, we used to fight all the time. We still do, in fact. On the phone, all we do is butt heads. But strangely when I think of my family, I miss her the most.”

Taeyong took another drink.

“You should go then.” Taeyong said quietly. “If you miss them, you should go back to them.”

Yuta side eyed him. “Is this your way of firing me?”

Taeyong shook his head. “No. This job will be here for you when you return. But I just think you should go spend some time with your family man. It’s been too long.”

_And this could be the last you see of them. No, it most definitely will be._

“You won’t have a bar back.” Yuta said, rubbing condensation off the glass.

“I’ll manage.” Taeyong said. It was true that work would be hell without a replacement for Yuta, but he would handle it.

Yuta seemed to think for a while, but Taeyong could already see that he was sold.

“Ten days.” He said. “I’ll take a ten day vacation. You better not have replaced me by the time I get back.”

Taeyong placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder, squeezing it tight before letting go.

“Of course, I would never.”

~

 

                Jaehyun had not slept at all. He’d stayed up with Mark until the boy stopped crying and let himself be lead to his bed. He pulled the covers up to Mark’s chin, and dragged himself to the kitchen to partake in Taeyong’s liquor cabinet. Then, with a strange blend of elation and sadness, bent to clean the barley tea that had been spilled during Taeyong and Mark’s altercation. Since leaving, how often had he dreamt of coming back to this familiar home? When he was curled up in foreclosed houses, ignoring the skittering of the rats, he’d dreamt of being in this very living room: watching Taeyong peel apples, Mark lying on his belly doing homework, letting the condensation of beer cans cool their brows. Every fiber of his being had wanted to return. But not under these circumstances. Not like this.

                The clock on the mantel read 5am. Soon, the sun would begin to peek over the horizon, and Taeyong would be closing down the bar.

                Jaehyun left the home he’d missed, and let his muscle memory lead him. He walked towards the bar where he’d first laid eyes on Taeyong, past the alley where he’d been assaulted and found by Mark and his young friends. To Jaehyun, it felt as though his life was a series of pullies and strings, each decision hurtling him towards some inescapable ending, tangling him inextricably from both Taeyong and Mark. But what was that ending? How did his story close? With continued homelessness? With success? With a liver failing from his inability to reign in his desires?

                He only hoped it was with them, somehow. Jaehyun wasn’t ashamed to admit that now. He hoped at the end of his story, he was with them.

                _Because mother and father never were my family._ They’d thrown him away once he stopped obeying. Didn’t protect him when he needed protection. Didn’t comfort him when he confessed he’d been touched without consent. Beat him senseless for loving what they believed he should not. Cleaved him from their lives as if he’d been some awful fever-dream made for forgetting.

                The ones who had put themselves into danger for him, dragged him into safety, bandaged him with careful fingers, taught him to _Try a little gentleness…_

                None of it had been his parents. It had been Mark, and it had been—

                Taeyong stood in the milky light of dawn, locking the bar behind him. The morning light suffused in his hair, a blazing crown of soft chestnut. His dark circles jumped out purple beneath his eyes, but he was no less stunning than he always was. That ragged, world-worn beauty. The bones of his sternum pressing starkly against his skin. His sleeves were splotched brown and pink with injury. Mark was right, Taeyong was heavy with secrets. He was always hiding something that seemed to cause him great mental injury. But right now, that didn’t matter. Because Jaehyun was here, and he was not going anywhere this time.

                Taeyong turned, looking lethargic but surprised to see Jaehyun standing there. He was tipsy, a little unsteady on his feet.

                “We’re closed.” Taeyong said wearily. Jaehyun didn’t respond, he just stepped forward, closer and closer until there was barely a hair’s length between them. He could smell citrus and beer, sweat and menthol. His head spun with it.

                Taeyong didn’t back away, whether or not it was from sheer exhaustion or something else, Jaehyun wasn’t sure. In his mind, he remembered that almost-kiss they had shared that sweltering night before Jaehyun had left, the way their lips brushed but didn’t meet. How he had stopped to let Taeyong make that choice, and he had been rejected.

                Taeyong looked up at him, his wide brown eyes a little doe-like in the sun. He had a small scar across his eyebrow that Jaehyun had never noticed.

                “I can’t run from this anymore.” Taeyong said softly, though Jaehyun was sure that he wasn’t really talking to him. At least not about this aching moment. But it didn’t matter.

                “I can’t either.” Jaehyun said, closing the distance between them. That final green acre. He felt Taeyong stiffen, and then yield, tipping his head back, his lips falling open. In the softness of his mouth, all Jaehyun could taste was home.


End file.
